Topic: Victim Reward Notices (Read 2802 times)

Yes.

Cars might be used to run over innocent living humans, or pets even.  Shall we stop driving?

Big difference, however:  Only one driver is required to use a car for bad purposes.  In order to really block tainted bitcoin from being spent, ALL the miners (including the person trying to spend the coin) would have to block it.  The stop-thieves-using-taint strategy only works when a significant portion of the miners (or folks who accept bitcoin) decide to employ it.

I'm going to keep driving, because I drive safely.  And I'm going to keep an eye out for bitcoin from the known heists, but I won't do much about it without doing some due diligence first.  You're welcome to be sloppy with it - the bitcoin, that is, because your errors will likely be quickly corrected.  But with your car, please drive safely!

that taint might be used to block legitimate owners of bitcoins from spending the bitcoins?
people who paid for or mined bitcoins, not able to spend the bitcoins, and accused of being thiefs?

Yeah, but with bitcoins its hard to proove to know/not know origin of coins and were they stolen or not. Anyone can put coins in mixer and sell them as they please.
If anything gets assaulted from side of law, it will be exaclty those mixers and alike services, and with every right

cheers

Yes in most countries that is the case.  If you knowingly purchase stolen goods that is a felony in and of itself but even if you unknowingly purchase stolen goods the goods will be returned to the original owner if he can prove ownership.

That's a good question!  Does the current justice system make everyone down the line of buyers of that stolen car into a victim of the theft?  Each of those buyers paid some money - does the justice system confiscate it all?  It seems likely, given its parasitic nature, but it also seems like it would be pretty hard to justify.  On the side of evil, unfortunately, is the fact that they justify taxing people in order to provide food, shelter, and healthcare to the criminals while preventing those same criminals from getting any opportunity to make restitution directly to their victims.  So maybe they do just confiscate it all, relying on the same stupidity of the masses that protects them in the prison racket.

For a time, I suppose it will depend on that, but I think it's important to remember that whatever coercive authority comes up with is just a system of coercive threats.  As a long term strategy, that creates war, gangs, and violence.  If we want to get rid of those things, we need to come up with better solutions than they do.  They won't come up with them because they thrive on the chaos they create with all their coercion.  They use it to justify raising taxes.  Government is the largest organized crime ring.

Bitcoin seems to be considered a form of commodity in the latest regulation attempts .. so you cannot really expect the same rules for currencies to be applied on Bitcoin.

If I bought a stolen car... I am not sure I get to keep it if they caught the seller and traced the car to my garage.

I think all depends on the future of regulation and how will the authorities setup the Bitcoin system - they might not share the idea that every Bitcoin is equal and might require doing transactions only with clean coins.
We will see, but it is definitely possible because of Bitcoin being inherently non-anonymous with a complete public ledger.
Why not use this feature to its full potential? People whose coins have been stolen will certainly approve.

It might sound foolish to create a black market for drugs but it was exactly what has been done in the past.
Why not a cryptocurrency black market when the prisons start to get empty after the ongoing drug legalization succeeds?

In a scam called "Man In The Middle" (MITM), the victim believes he's buying something from the scammer.  The scammer is actually buying something from an honest seller.  The victim eventually comes after the honest seller because that's who got his payment.  The only protection from this scam that I have found, regardless of what medium of exchange is used, is to be able to hunt down your trading partner.

This is also the easiest way to protect yourself from buying "crime coins" - just as the difference between a thief selling stolen goods (or currency) and the scammer in MITM is that the thief got the coins through outright theft instead of pretending to have something to sell.  That is an unimportant difference.  Another unimportant difference is between buying and selling.  Just call it trading.

Once you grok that buying and selling are the same thing, you'll see that bitcoin itself and the blockchain we can use to track the flow of it isn't all that important in regards to the legitimacy you seek.  Transparency is the best solution.  This is the foundation of KYC and AML laws, but, as usual, since the government made them, it's a very crappy implementation, relying as it does on enforcement and intimidation of honest people instead of personal responsibility and integrity.

If you don't want to secure the ability to hunt down your trading partner in case you turn out to have received stolen bitcoin, you can check the "taint" feature on blockchain.info to see whether or not the addresses you believe were used to hold stolen bitcoins have ever held any of the bitcoin you got.  I've been scammed enough times to choose the ability to hunt down as the easier protection.

It's also interesting that most justice systems do not recognize the possession of stolen currency as criminal (unless you committed the theft).  So, at least from the perspective of those justice systems, you aren't culpable.  Of course, anyone from whom you want to buy something has every right to refuse to trade with you for any reason, including their own belief about what Bitcoin addresses have held stolen coins.

This makes me really paranoid, you never know.
Is there a way to know if your Bitcoins are from a legitimate precedence? I dont want mr godfather dumping their crime coins on my wallet.

(Red colorization mine.)

Possession is to the hyperreal what control is to the real.

Considering your own property rights and those of others, which is more important to end, or perhaps you draw no such distinction, or else they are too evenly matched to choose one over the other?

Would you say that you own your own body?

Do you see any danger of abandoning something precious when it is embedded or intertwined with something onerous?

If it were widely regarded as unacceptable to cause suffering for the purpose of protecting property rights, would you then see value in the tradition?

What is the significance to the tradition of property rights of the distinction Eisenstein draws between money and all other goods?

im not victom of bistamp hack .but i think bitstamp should cover money as they say they are biggest exchange and have a pro security bla bla bla

(Red colorization mine.)

Really, really bad!  It would be wonderful poetic justice though, wouldn't it?  Either I'd have to give all the help I could to (re-)find the seller in order to vindicate myself, or I'd have to just lose all that money.

How would you feel if you convinced a buddy to allow his daughter to go out with some college kid that your buddy's KKK background made him dislike, and then, while they were out on that date, a cop shows up with an arrest warrant on a hunt for the kid because he's wanted for a rape-murder?  What difference does it make how we feel about these things?  Does the prospect of how you'd feel motivate more diligence in making high-dollar deals?  I think that would be great!

Watch out for logical fallacies.  They don't indicate falsehoods, just the kind of sloppy thinking we're all taught in government schools.

In any case, Bitstamp has not offered any reward yet, so I'm not sure there's anything to worry about.

OP, how would you feel if you had bought 1,000BTC off of someone, only to find out later on that the BTC had been stolen from Bitstamp just minutes before you bought it, and your coins are now on a blacklist?

Here you go Bit: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/are-miners-free-to-exclude-whatever-transactions-they-want-929852

So it seems that it's already in the protocol, whether or not Gavin agrees.  But I think I must have misunderstood you.  Would you mind clarifying what you meant?

Well, gold isn't fungible either, unless you have a way to break it or melt it.  If you're willing to put the work in (heat, tools, whatever), you can make gold fungible.  Same goes for bitcoin (mining software).  The point is that whether or not any particular bit of bitcoin can be spent using the next block is up to everyone who works on solving that block and ultimately whoever succeeds.

Theoretically, Bitcreditscc's "top ten miners" could fork the blockchain going back to the theft and build a new chain that doesn't include that theft transaction, so his nightmare scenario is already a reality.  We are trusting them not to do that.

There are too many bitcoiners who haven't put enough critical thought into the beneficial long term effects of decentralized fungibility (miners making decisions about what transactions they want to honor) to see it as acceptable.  Bitstamp is probably afraid of pissing them off too much to offer the reward and suggest the method.  Or else they are simply guilty of participating in the scam and don't want to throw away their loot.

Therein lies the problem. Bitcoin was never fungible.

You people get emotional and stop thinking rationally. All you are saying is that we should be at the mercy of the top 10 pools because they produce the majority of blocks. ie everyone's ability to transact is in the hands of ten people.

LOL  @ quoting Gavin Andresen. Go ask him now if he thinks it's a good enough idea to make it protocol.

Perhaps you should go argue with Gavin Andresen, whose proposal from 2012 disagrees with what I think as an even more fundamental aspect of Bitcoin:
 

Let the buyer beware has a lot of practical application here.

That will never be acceptable because that is messing with a key point of bitcoin, fungibility. NOPE

i heard from a moderator on btc-e that someone tried to trade/sell 700 of the stolen coins through their site, but btc-e denied the trade. not sure if btc-e kept the coins and returned them to stamp, or gave them back to the "owner".

If you or your company (I'm talking to YOU, Bitstamp!) has been robbed of bitcoins, please consider proving it by offering a reward for making any effort to add to the thief's concerns.

If you review the history of my posts, you will see that:

• I very much like the idea of taint.
• I very much dislike coercive authority.
• I recommend that people use their consciences and pay attention.

In another post, I recommended this public announcement:

When I suggested the idea of taint in the past, blockchain.info added the "taint" feature.  Thanks Blockchain!  Many in this community balked at the idea of making it difficult to spend coins from any particular address.  Their reasons generally fell into three groups:

• The fungibility of Bitcoin would be threatened by such practices.
• Blocking transactions is tyrannical.
• Innocent individuals could be negatively affected by attempts to block transactions.

The first objection, based on fungibility, implicitly introduces the idea that miners should be required to include all transactions that fit the protocol.  I don't see how this is feasible, technologically.  I suppose the proponents of this ideal of fungibility did not realize that miners already have the choice to exclude whatever transactions they want.  That fact seems a much better target for this objection.  If you're going to try to convince miners to include transactions they know are related to thefts in order to preserve fungibility, engineer a way for the protocol to prevent them from excluding transactions.  One of the beautiful things about Bitcoin, for me, is that the protocol itself encourages freedom and responsibility, so let's keep that going and abandon the idealistic attempt to have miners be willfully blind to property rights violations.

The second objection is much more effectively handled not by blindly including all transactions, but by challenging and ceasing support for tyranny.  If you feel a transaction should have been included and was not, then you go do what you need to convince the miner who could have included it to change his mind next time.  Just please don't discourage others from using their consciences.  As long as individuals are free to mine blocks containing transactions with stolen coins in them, I'm happy.  I wouldn't do it, but the last thing I would want is to forcibly prevent others from doing so.  My appeal is to the conscience.  Reasoned persuasion is the key to human advancement, and coercion is the shit holding it back.

The third objection is a very good one, but everything we do has the potential to hurt innocent people.  Due diligence is called "due" for a reason. 

So by all means, follow your conscience.  If you care enough to do the work required to determine whether or not 1L2JsXHPMYuAa9ugvHGLwkdstCPUDemNCf actually does contain stolen coins, and you have the opportunity to include or exclude a transaction from that address (or one of the addresses to which its coins have been distributed) in a block you're solving, think about how the respect for property rights has helped humanity in the past and consider keeping that tradition alive.

On the possibility that Bitstamp secretly cooperated with the thief in order to embezzle $5M, consider waiting for them to publish something like what I suggested above.