It's like arguing with someone who watches fox news. No interest in understanding the issues involved, at all. They just want to scream at the tv.

You've either not read or not understood what Mike wrote.

Redlisting does not involve blacklisting or whitelisting coins. Think of it as attaching a breadcrumb trail to coins that someone suspects are illicitly gained. It doesn't stop anyone from accepting them or spending them. It does, however, provide kind of an informational bread crumb trail for law enforcement to later track if it's necessary.

I'm not sure I know anyone reasonable who didn't think the NSA was widely spying on the world. Snowden confirmed it and provided valuable details as to just how watched we are, but come on.

This guy just claimed that Hearn's proposal was a way for the US gov to seize control of bitcoin worldwide. That's a tinfoil hat statement. Patently ridiculous.

(Maybe not ridiculous at some time in the future when bitcoin is large enough to actually raise any existential alarms in the halls of power, but we're a couple orders of magnitude from that, and nothing the federal government does is as subtle as co-opting a google security engineer living in Switzerland to start a discussion on a small (the foundation does not have that many members) message board.)

Sure, that's fine. And the three people that will care about your opinion there can redlist my coins, which won't affect me at all. Likewise, I could redlist your coins, and the three people that would care won't affect you at all, because neither of us run a largely trusted service passing information to its clients.

For a site where so many people give lip service to freedom, it's incredible how many people have such opposition to the idea of entities (people, companies, etc) passing information to each other in a mutually willing exchange of value.

I'm not making any assumptions. I'm saying that it's a preliminary discussion where nobody knows if or what a workable solution would look like. Could be a total dead-end and very well may be, but no reason not to explore the idea to see if there's a way to make it work.

Take a deep breath, remove the tinfoil hat.

Please read my previous post. Mike started a discussion about what is effectively a reputation service for coins. He didn't even propose that the Bitcoin Foundation adopt promoting the idea of one as policy, or that he himself is convinced a redlist is a good idea.

They're going to spring up regardless of Mike's proposal, though. Some bitcoin services will use them, some won't. They'll be full of holes and cannot, by the nature of bitcoin, be 100% effective.

A reputation system is a way for individuals and entities (companies, whatever) to communicate information to each other. I thought we're about free speech here, and freedom of individuals and entities to transact (money, information, etc) with each other?

It's not as old as the internet, but you're right that it is pretty old - the first was in 1989. They have far more power now though, because of bitcoin.

Typically, the best way to shut down ransomware criminals is to use the payment method as an attack vector. Shut down the payment vector, shut down the motivation for the person or organization trying to extort people that way. Cryptolocker currently accepts bitcoin and Greendot Moneypak. The latter vector is going to get shut down, because it's via a centralized system owned by a company that has executives who don't want to go to jail for money laundering.

You can't just shut down the bitcoin vector in the same way though, as we all know. And that makes bitcoin the not-so-secret weapon that ransomware is going to exploit to hell and back. Just think for a minute how many people's computers are zombie'd/slaved or otherwise infected with viruses. Now add a very lucrative, direct way to collect money from individual victims, in an essentially anonymous way (if they're careful). I don't know about you, but I think that sound in the distance is half the black hat hackers in the world's drool collectively hitting the floor.


Well, Mike's a very smart guy, and an expert in security, so I may not understand his proposal with precision, but I'm pretty sure the outrage on this thread is a result of people just flying off the handle for no good reason. To be very clear, he's calling it a red list specifically because it's not the same as a blacklist. He's not proposing auto-filtering out 'tainted' coins. Here's the short summary:

"Consider an output that is involved with some kind of crime, like a theft or extortion. A "redlist" is an automatically maintained list of outputs derived from that output, along with some description of why the coins are being tracked. When you receive funds that inherit the redlisting, your wallet client would highlight this in the user interface. Some basic information about why the coins are on the redlist would be presented. You can still spend or use these coins as normal, the highlight is only informational. To clear it, you can contact the operator of the list and say, hello, here I am, I am innocent and if anyone wants to follow up and talk to me, here's how. Then the outputs are unmarked from that point onwards. For instance, this process could be automated and also built into the wallet."

This is basically a reputation service. There could be many of them, though it's a network on top of a network, so I'd have to imagine the network effect is pretty huge in terms of winner-takes-all.

He had written more about it here earlier: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=157130.60

And to be clear, he's not even proposing it. He's just pointing out that there is a potentially huge problem with cryptolocker and other methods of clear crime (I don't know anyone who thinks extortion is ok, vs Silk Road, where there's legitimate debate) where what bitcoin does is completely shut down the attack vector law enforcement can most easily use to shut down the incentive to commit the crime.

Neither I nor Mike nor anyone else know what the solution (if there is one) to the problem is, but it certainly deserves discussion, and redlisting is one idea. That's all his post was. A discussion. Blacklisting (distinct from and way worse than redlisting) would be completely off the table for everyone I know in the Foundation, for what it's worth.

Mike's core concern, based on the thread on the Foundation forums, is that Cryptolocker is a serious problem, and because it's such a demonically simple way to extort cash from people, it's going to become a huge problem. There will be many, many copycats soon, and you get enough non-techies getting ripped off and having their first experience with bitcoin this way, and suddenly govs around the world become very hostile to bitcoin (vs barely caring about it, and figuring out how they feel about it as is the case now). And then (or perhaps before), you can kiss any hope of business acceptance of bitcoin (something we all dream of, I'd imagine, so that we can transact in bitcoin without having to resort to exchanges) goodbye.

Mike's example is Tor, which is a network that failed to clean up the abuse that goes through it, resulting in all sorts of networks and sites now banning access from Tor exit nodes, drastically reducing the ability of someone to use Tor to normally use the internet. The same thing can happen with bitcoin, and as someone who does want to be able to transact in bitcion someday, failing to look at ways to isolate bad actors from the bitcoin network is a mistake.

I don't think -anybody- at the Foundation is happy about even having to have this discussion. But the discussion has to happen, because Cryptolocker is a real issue that's going to become a lot bigger soon. There are very few vectors of attack against Cryptolocker (and inevitable copycats), whereas stuff like Silk Road is almost guaranteed to fail long-term due to the huge number of vectors for law enforcement to use against it. Unfortunately, one of those very few vectors usable against Cryptolocker is bitcoin.

I think it's unlikely the Foundation will end up making coin redlisting/tainting/blacklisting/whatever an official policy they try to push, but the idea that we shouldn't even be having the discussion is crazy. The process at arriving at a solution for problems usually involves many dead ends and dark caves before you find the route to the top of the mountain.

Who is 'us' exactly?

If you guys want to have a productive conversation that has a chance of influencing Bitcoin Foundation policy, why not join the Foundation and help vote in who -you- think should be running it? Or start a rival organization founded on principles you approve of and use that organization to lobby for your collective point of view.

I'm a lifetime member, but I don't agree with everything the Foundation does, or everything every other member of the Foundation believes, nor do I support all of its leadership.

The Foundation is, however, like it or not, currently the premiere organization in the bitcoin space, with virtually every major Western player (and some eastern) as part of it. The members and sponsors of it are, in a very real way, the ones building the future of bitcoin, from all angles - development, lobbying the government for regulations that are less insane, building out the infrastructure necessary for any kind of mainstream adoption to even begin with, working to proactively educate a range of people from bankers to the general public about what bitcoin is, and what opportunities it represents, and so on.

That is a fundamental misunderstanding among the tinfoil hat crowd on this site.

USD is worth something because ultimately it's backed by an army that can insist you pay your property tax in USD, and because it's backed by the outflow of payments from the US government, which only pays its people and contractors in USD.

I give them props for their AML and anti-fraud systems, which are why those limits exist. I was maxing my buys through them for awhile, and started getting hit with those high-risk letters. Complained to customer service, talked to them a bit, and they whitelisted me so I don't get hit by that. Really liked that level of customer service. I know my mainstream bank doesn't give it to me, no matter how much cash I run through/store in their system.

Yes.

Obvious scam is obvious.

There is no such thing as an investment that returns anything that has zero risk, which is what that site prominently declares. There is no such thing as an investment with zero risk, period. If someone tells you that, they are either incredibly naive, or trying to scam you.

Yeah, living in dream worlds does provide advantages!

It's no different than trading anything else - there is no formula, and most traders, including professionals, end up failing to beat the market.

Listing their bitcoins for sale is exactly what one does in order to dump them.

Doesn't seem like the author understands what corporations are. There is no jurisdiction in the world that I'm aware of that will allow a corporation that doesn't resolve back to a natural person eventually.

You don't really understand the concept of risk if you're labeling bitcoin the safest investment in -any- way. It's extremely risky as an asset class.

What? Under a fiat money system, people invest in an effort to outpace inflation. Who just leaves money sitting in a plain bank account, or under your mattress, doing nothing?