Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Eventually the FUNGIBILITY issue of bitcoin will make headlines ...
by
jonald_fyookball
on 27/09/2015, 19:58:10 UTC
What are you going to do if I'm a criminal and decide to "taint" your Bitcoin by sending bits to your wallet? Sell your bitcoins?

I'm guessing you mean send some bits to one of his addresses. I suspect "taint" applies to txouts rather than addresses. He can avoid "tainting" his bitcoins with your bits by simply never spending your txout -- even though he has the private key.
 

huh?

I'm confused.  Maybe I don't understand Bitcoin transactions well enough.   

I thought once incoming transactions reach the Bitcoin address, you can either spend them or not -- you don't
get to say which of the inputs of other parties count toward your transaction.  If I'm wrong, please explain.

I'm not sure about other wallets, but in Bitcoin-qt you can enable "coin control features" and select which inputs you want to spend.

I wasn't aware of that.  I assume that only goes one level deep.  In other words, if I have stolen coins (.5 BTC) and normal coins (.5 BTC)
and I send that to another address of mine, and then send you 1 BTC, you can't separate out the stolen coins from the normal coins.