1 BTC ≠ 1 BTC.ICE is now able to track transactions made through nearly a dozen different digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether.
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-ice/Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept.
Fuck you Coinbase.
The destruction of privacy is also an economic issue, bad for Bitcoin.
Bitcoiners who accept this are their own worst enemies.With tracking inevitably comes UTXO blacklisting, and thus the continued process of turning Bitcoin into an NFT. 1 BTC ≠ 1 BTC.
Oldie-but-goody, Adam Back in 2014:
https://youtu.be/3dAdI3Gzodo?t=47My comments on another thread, re “coin taint”:
[...] —and in the long term, please support any competent efforts to add to Bitcoin what Dr. Back says on one of his slides:
“Idealized cryptographic ecash aims to enforce fungibility via indistinguishability rather than law... trust in mathematics over law”.
Dr. Back discusses various privacy technologies, from centralized blind signatures to Zerocoin/Zerocash. Unfortunately, the technological information is only up to date as of 2014. His explanation of the fungibility issue is the important part here; the only change on
that point is that the problem has become worse, much worse.
So stated, because some people will only pay attention when they are proverbially hit in the wallet. Fungibility is one of the most important arguments for privacy.
That's a known attack vector and was inevitable. There's no historical justification to assume those in power will give it up willingly without a fight. Luckily it's greatly negated by the concept of jurisdictions, as long as we don't have one world government, and BTC is global. What do you care if North Korea/China/Russia blacklists your BTC? And they'd feel the same about your laws. Gresham's Law tells us that your "blacklisted" UTXOs will just find their way to another jurisdiction, and their blacklisted UTXOs will come to you, rinse and repeat. As long as we don't have one world hegemony