I'm disappointed that Mike Hearn would advocate for the use of blacklists, tainting and reduced fungibility of bitcoin . As one of the significant members of the The Bitcoin Foundation, he has the ability to make this kind of scheme a reality. For someone who just went on a rant against the NSA for violating Google's privacy, this kind of betrayal of the bitcoin user's privacy is really heinous. Who will dictate what constitutes a crime? Who will dictate when a bitcoin will no longer be listed? I doubt that he's given much thought to such questions beyond "whatever the police say", which, in this current political climate, is a very ignorant stance. I suggest those who want to keep bitcoin a viable and fungible currency let Mr. Hearn and all of the The Bitcoin Foundation members know that this idea should not be implemented and produce policy positions rejecting it.
I opened a new topic on the Bitcoin Foundation's forum:
Deep concern about the foundation's chairman of Law and Policy (Mike Hearn) pushing for coin taint
Me, and many others in the bitcoin community are deeply concerned about Mike Hearn pushing for coin taint. We feel that if the Bitcoin Foundation is even going to consider mentioning this in the upcoming government meeting, that we can no longer stand behind them. This is serious. Coin taint is even worse than increasing the 21 million limit. Since the chairman of Law and Policy is involved here, I would like to call for a vote against this, and a clear stance from the Bitcoin Foundation. I know many of the board members are supporters of mixing coins even more, so something like this can never happen again. It would be a good message to the bitcoin community to confirm that the foundation supports keeping coins anonymous, instead of going in the opposite direction.
Yes!
this is the core of the issue, it doesn't really matter that some poeple are working on bitcoin red-list or wtv. what matter is the Foundation should stand WITH us not against us on these core issues.
we the poeple have made it clear from day one that tainting coins is a bad idea for so many reasons. to see the Foundation back a project like this is wrong, it is wrong!
we should be seeing the FBI working on these projects and then we should see the Foundation discredit their efforts and explain why such a schemes just wont work. the problem with this is that
it won't stop bitcoin money laundering that at all (it will just make it 3 hops harder, not much harder) and actually end up causing problems for innocent people and bitcoin itself.