Topic: would you accept stolen bitcoins? (Read 4479 times)

It is important for bitcoin that everyone always accepts coins regardless of their history. So yes, I would do it.

Well almost all the cash has stains of drugs on them, and the government even accept them and you too, so if our hand is computerised when we are 18 to answer the question,

Will you accept stolen or illegal gotten money?
And your answer is No, you will end up not seeing money for years.
 

Same goes for bitcoins.

DarkCoin isn't anonymous against the government.

My vote goes to very strong anonymity. Darkcoin is a good example.

Thank you for your insightful and 100% correct post!

My $.02.

That would be true if the general public agrees as they do with cash.

But the problem is cash is highly regulated and so grandmas don't just see their money go "and poof it's gone" from their bank account or when exchanging dollars for euros without some restitution.

The majority of the population is not going to accept our ideal of unregulated, decentralized wild west.

And the government has the legal authority to apply the nemo dat principle of our common law system to Bitcoin, because it is not legal tender, it is not sufficiently regulated by the government, and it is traceable forever.

We either add very strong anonymity so that the traceability is rendered impotent, or we succumb to the will of majority.

This is democracy. If you want to destroy democracy, then you must have anonymity. Period. That is all I am saying. It is fact.

What if you did an otc trade, or put money on an exchange, you bought BTC for 500 USD. Then you went on to buy something at a store. Store confiscates money or rejects it and claims it is no good, would you be happy?

Or the fiat version. You pay with a 100 dollar bill in a food store. You have 62 left, you go for a meal at McDonalds. They look at your cash and says: Nah, no good.

Would it be fun?

The point is that once bitcoins or cash has been stolen, it's still good. You can only prove bitcoin theft on the first hop, once it moves through more addresses, you cannot know if the original thief has them or if he sold them to someone else innocent.

The only case I can think of is if an exchange receives coins that can be proven to be from a theft, and then freeze it immediately, but in most cases coins that are gone are gone, and that's how it must be.

 

I agree, but without anonymity that the government can't break, then your ideal will never stand.



What you feel is right is not what the laws says. I already covered in great detail what the laws says. I even cited case law.

Disclaimer: consult your own professor adviser. I am only sharing my opinions. You are responsible for your decisions.

By the time stolen Bitcoins would be identified to be blacklisted, they would likely be in the hands of legitimate users and would likely only serve to hurt the people who don't actually steal them. As for accepting stolen bitcoins, I probably would accept them, this is because its likely that everyone who owns Bitcoins owns some that were stolen. Now it might be a different situation if some random person came up to me and gave me Bitcoins that he said that he/she just stole. I would probably accept them if they were just giving them to me and simply return them to the rightful owners if I can find them. If they actually were buying something with Bitcoin from me, I would not accept it because I wouldn't want to support Bitcoin theft.

How is it "responsibility", when the actions of a third party (in this case Mt Gox) can cause your bitcoins to be lost?

Theres nothing the end user could do to prevent the theif?


I Think Bitcoin is great in that you can *select* the responsibility. You can select if you want to be responsible for your own bitcoins, and thus apply your own security to them. (and not be forced to have a friggin' 6 digit pin code and a security token for a bank account with only 50$ on it, thats pretty stupid by the banks - security should at least match the value protected by the security)

But if you select that you don't want to be responsible for your coins, but have someone other to be responsible for them, you need to have a protection scheme that would recover the assets if this "someone other" does lose its assets.
Like banks have state Insurance, there could be a blacklisting scheme called "bitcoin Insurance", but this are as said, ONLY applied to entities holding assets for a large number of users
Like Mt Gox, and such entities.
The system could work in some way with a blacklisting scheme, that you can opt in for, but only when personally accepted by Gavin/Satoshi or someone high in the bitcoin scheme, OR a Public vote.
To get in the system, you need to maintain:
-large amounts of Money.
-identity should be known to the authorities (a licensed operator) or personally to Gavin/Satoshi
-have a user base for the service that is large too.
-The Money owned must be spread out, you can't have 10 000 users that own 0.00000001 bitcoin and 1 user owning 10 000 bitcoins to get into the system, it must be spread out so every user of your service have depoisted a fair amount so the value that you hold, its ownership are spread out by the service.


A limit for each user could be maintained too, so when X % of the stolen Money has been recovered, then each user of the service gets back up to X BTC, of the Money they depoisted, the rest of the recovered money are destroyed and the blacklist are revoked.
There must be schemes to validate that the user did use the service and have coins depoisted too.


Like the state bank Insurance in the EU/Sweden. If the bank goes bankrupty, you can regain up to 100 000 € of your depoist.
USA have a similiar scheme with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corporation (FDIC) that insures up to $250.000 of the owners Money for US banks.

Bitcoin needs a similiar scheme to recover thefts and losses.

Blacklisting would kill bitcoin, if this ever happens Im the first one out the door.

We are entering a new age of responsibility. People have been coddled by state policies for so long, they forget how to exist outside of them.

If you own BTC, they can be stolen or lost and will be unrecoverable. Thats part of the deal. Its part of what makes Bitcoin great, actually.

If you cant handle that responsibility, cryptocurrency isnt for you.

I Think accepting stolen goods is wrong.

But it seems here that different people define "stole" differently.
I define "stealing" as taking something when not authorized by law to do so.


So confiscating Money is NOT stealing. Its done by the authorities. You voted the authorities in, which means you agreed to their decisions. You agree, everytime in the voting Booth, that if you do X, the authorities have the right to take your Money.
However, if you steal my 50$ bill, and I take it back, its stealing in a double sense. The 50$ bill has been stolen 2 times: One time when you unauthorizedly took it from me, and one time when I unauthorizedly took it back from you.
(If you don't know or have different laws in your country: Its illegal in Sweden to "steal back" anything that was stolen from you, you HAVE to to request assistance through authorities or someone else that Controls the item and isnt affliated with you.)

The correct way of regaining stolen goods is to go through the authorities, that can confiscate the stolen goods from the thief and then give it back to the rightful owner, in this case you.
Another correct way, is if a third-party, arbitirator, Controls the item and gives it back to you. The arbitirator can be anyone not affliated or in close relation with the thief or owner of item, for example a attendant at a lost+found office, a bank which returns stolen Money to you, or anyone else that might handle the stolen goods.

The important thing here is that to be able to give back the item to the rightful owner legally, you should be in "rightful Control" of the item. One thing to get rightful Control of the item can be for example a phone manufacturer remote disable a stolen phone, and its then given in for repair. Then the phone can be returned to the rightful owner by the phone manufacturer.


Whats your definition of "stealing"?





Then we have this thing with fungibility. So if my 50$ bill was stolen, and then the authorities take the thief's TV and sell it on authority auction (same as you do when recover a debt) and earn 50$ on this, and the authorities give back the NEW 50$ bill to me, the thief's bill that he stole from me, is no longer "stolen".
This because of the fungibility, its the value that is important. If the thief's possession's value is reduced by 50$ with authorization of law, it does not matter if its done by taking back the exact same 50$ bill, or if the thief's possession's value is reduced by 50$ in a other way, and recovered to the rightful owner.


So the ljudotina's argument is wrong. Even if every bill has been stoled once in a time, the value of the bill has been recovered to the rightful owner, and that bill is "Clean" again.
Theres is a very few bills that are REALLY stolen and remain stolen.

The only time the exact bills do matter, is when there's been a large bank heist or bank robbery. Then the stolen bills are barred. You can't repay the bank with your own bills if you were found out with stolen bills because the stolen serial # would still be blacklisted. You have to give the exact stolen bills back to the bank. One reason for this is to gather evidence too of the heist.




So a "taint" system WOULD work, but needs ONLY to be applied to large heist and the background of the heist needs to be checked so the owner of the coins are not trying to cheat the system.

Can not stolen bitcoins be coloured? At least for this MtGox thing?
(I understand that more bitcoins will be stolen in the future, so you can't be recolouring everyday, but just for this case?) I know this is stupid, but maybe migrate to a fork without these btcs?

Yes, cocaine is good.

Would you use bills that have been used to snort cocaine?

Bitcoin doesn't smell

Definitive yes. I hope we can skip the silly tainted coins BS this time around. First time this came up at Gox, they probably froze accounts due to lost/hacked coins on their own exchange. This was years ago already.

Yes. I would, and, yes, I have. I'd obviously prefer not to know, but, some guy offered me huge discount on some BTC I was buying, I asked why, he said they were stolen. My reply was basically "I didn't steal them, and, I'm getting a discount. If I don't buy them, someone else will, so, why can't I get a discount?".

Well put