they will probably have database viewers, so you can see the clean addresses (legit businesesses) but not allow anyone to add-delete the database. afterall we dont want silk road or sites selling illegal weapons editing the database to say its withdrawal address is legit. or scammers saying they are fully SEC compliant... do we?
and secondly its not about taint.. if your going to visit an illegal site that deals in SERIOUS CRIMES. then it is kind of obvious, simply by looking at the products they sell
And once again why centralize the database around an LLC when a non profit or decentralized method could do the same thing? A wiki can be edited which is a good thing because we don't all agree on which addresses belong on the black list but we probably mostly agree about which addresses belong on the white list. Once again none of this matters for addresses.
Public keys do matter and I would love to have a database of public keys which I can access to know I'm dealing with a legit company and not a scam. I endorse at least that part if that is actually what they plan to implement but based on what is on their site we don't even know what they plan to do. They are vague about it and that is why people are reacting like this. You cannot be vague when you're talking about putting the mark on peoples money. And if that isn't what they plan to do then they need to give an interview or post on this forum for debate.
of course, and thats what makes me feel coin validation will ultimately be useless and that this histeria is not worth the anger its bringing. EG deposit bitcoins into a compliant exchange.. wait a bit for it to be mixed in with other peoples funds(dont trade for fiat). then withdraw the bitcoins. you will now have coins showing as being sourced from a clean address.. you then take it to bitstamp and trade for FIAT, then their coinvalidation checks see the coins are sourced from a clean address and you can easily withdraw funds into your FIAT bank account.
The problem is we don't know what they are planning because their plans are public enough. There will always be crime and ways to beat the system but that is not what I'm concerned about. I'm concerned about democracy more than I am about crime and people beating the system. If you don't have the ability to follow the money then you cannot have a democracy for long.
Democracy is very important as an ideal just like privacy is.
I don't understand how we can have a Bitcoin community which supports the goal of Wikileaks on one hand but on the other hand wants to have completely anonymous money.
You cannot have both. If you want to fight institutional corruption you have to follow the money. If you want anonymous money then you have to accept institutional corruption as the end result.
Many of us work towards what we want and attempt to avoid being coerced. That results in two goals that must seem contradictory to you:
"privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful"
Bitcoin offers advantages to the weak, not the powerful (i.e. the state). So it should be anonymous. Wikileaks is good because it exposes the corruption of the powerful.
The state and extensions/agents of the state should be transparent because they are coercive and we are all paying for them. As customers we generally want a good product - a transparent state. Or do you want to just "roll over" ?
The state isn't the exclusive place where all powerful people are. All power does not rest within the state.
A lot of Bitcoins are owned by the powerful and a lot of people who aren't powerful now but who own a lot of Bitcoins will become powerful in several years. Just like we would want the ability to know whether or not George Soros, Bill Gates or the Koch bros are influencing politics we would want to know what Satoshi or whomever is influencing. We have every reason to want transparency to be able to follow the money trail of anybody. It should even apply to me if necessary if I ever have a lot of money or I'm considered powerful.
But I don't think it should be used to bully everyone as a weapon of state power. I agree with you that the state should be more transparent but I think "the state" isn't just people working for the government in civilian capacity. If we have an oligarchy then there should be transparency there as well. We need transparency in the state to deal with corruption and we need transparency outside of the state to deal with corruption. There should be no safe havens for people who seek to coerce and corrupt the nation.
So for that reason there should be no bank secrecy. I'm not really a big fan of secrets which can affect the lives of many people. There might be justification for keeping some secrets (national security) and there are necessary secrets but... If you're a person in charge of other peoples lives, who has power over other people, then you shouldn't expect to live a private life where you can keep secrets from the people you rule over. You should expect to have every aspect of your life investigated so that you can be verified/vetted for access.
If you're not powerful then there has to be some line in the sand enforced by law and technological means to protect you from being politically targeted and investigated by the powerful in fishing expeditions. If a powerful person decides to trigger a criminal investigation then they hire private investigators who can watch every thing you do until you commit a crime.
It's not a very fair system. For that reason in order to have democracy and liberty in the system you need privacy to protect the people in the community from political persecution. Any system which can try to link identities to transactions in a database presents a high value target which can be abused if implemented in the wrong way or hacked if not secured.
"You can still spend or use these coins as normal, the highlight is only informational. To clear it, you can contact the operator of the list and say, hello, here I am, I am innocent and if anyone wants to follow up and talk to me, here's how."
I'm not even a libertarian yet this made me wanna puke.
And contact the operator how? If It cannot be done in pseudo anonymous fashion then it removes privacy from the user. The operator should not have to be trusted with identity information of the user.
If this could be done in automated fashion where I sign the coins tagging it with my digital signature (which is clean) but remain pseudo anonymous to the operator then I would be okay with that. I'll play ball with security checks to access certain sites or financial networks but I should not have to give up privacy to do it. I don't think an operator should be given the power access peoples identities linked to their private transactions is what I'm saying. I'm not against these sorts of databases existing if it were voluntary, decentralized and controlled by the user. If the database were stored in a blockchain or some decentralized network where access is granted by the user then it can work better. The user can connect their public key to their real identity and sign or tag certain things which they want to claim so that if their coins are tainted they can say "these coins belong to me and I'm associated with these addresses which also belong to me", "my digital signature is trusted and I have verified my identity with these different places".
If anything we should be moving away from storing passwords and personal identity information on the web in central databases and instead moving to a system of public keys and digital signatures. If a digital signature has a reputation and history for clean transactions and the user claims ownership of certain addresses voluntarily I would be okay with that.
It should be as simple as the system checking to see if the address I'm using is linked to any transactions being investigated by the authorities. If it is then of course websites will want to block that off so as not to be investigated themselves. But if I'm innocent or if I have nothing to hide then I should be able to claim my transactions which prove my innocence. If they ask for your name and address for every site as we saw Bitfunder trying to do then that isn't going to work. Bitfunder was asking for everyone's name and address so they could block people out based on region.
