It was Rosewater who brought the topic into this arena of gentlemen.


The taint paper has stirred several reactions.

Hm, by the refined language, I sense a fellow Oxford scholar?  

Seriously, I don't see the paper as advocating anything in particular. If it actually is, I didn't notice or I deem the advocacy irrelevant. The strength of that discussion is the what-if speculation it suggests. It is assumed that the public Taintchain is a reality. The Taintchain makes it effectively instant to look up taint, which is distributed in a strict LIFO fashion. This sounds as a prescription (advocating), but I hear a scientific stance. "It's a precise working hypothesis with good effects on the engineering," it sounds to me. The Taintchain can actually become real today, once the blockchain is scanned to create a different view of the transaction database. Keeping the Taintchain current is a trivial matter.

Under these assumptions, there are interesting consequences. Different administrations will be interested in tracking different events. And they will each be able to do that in a much easier way than today. And anyone else can do the same, too. The algorithm is there. How long before an open source solution allows you to track any taintchain known to man, as well as hypothetical ones defined by the user's ow custom rules? I think this ease of implementation makes it likely that it will get done.

Now, initiating taint on a whim or on user action can be a daunting task for a public administration, but limiting the initial " taint award" to only a few well-known events (like, Mt.Gox size only - either finance-wise or  by media resonance) is completely doable. As is picking your own pet taint-generating events.

No one has to like that. I don't know if I would myself. But it's a realistic possibility in, say, China for export controls. See the what-if? Chinese taint wouldn't mean much in the USA, right? Or wouldn't it?

Food for thought.

Possible limits to exchange liability are also vaguely hypothesized, but it's lawyer stuff, so the authors - computer scientists, remember - don't toy with the idea too much. They appear to be fascinated by the game theoretical implications. I also am.

Or maybe it's no trouble at all. Your claim is simply ignored because it didn't make it to the master list of scams. It's not even 1/100,000 of Gox size after all. Or maybe someone snitches on you, dealing in drugs or military technology or whatever. One address paying you gets leaked. What happens to your coins? Which countries are involved? Which exchange did the coins pass through?

A paper that gets me thinking along these lines must be a good paper under some definition of good.

Nice find my ass, my ass
As we say in Oxford after class.