Blockchain Surveillance Is Accelerating Privacy Tool Development
news.bitcoin.com
news.bitcoin.com
If this is money laundering - than cash is money laundering. Plain and simple.
> go after everyone with tainted bitcoin
How? What for? owning tainted bitcoin isn't illegal and given the amount of "tainted" coins it's probably not even enough for probable cause.
[0] tho I guess in some cases it could very well fulfill it (>50% probability of a crime having been committed)
1. XMR / BTC .. $11,500,000
2. XMR / USD .. $ 65,000
To measure actual usage, one could watch how many transactions are done per hour or something like that: http://moneroblocks.info/
What's with this "we need something new" instead of improving what we have? Ready to jump into another new cryptocurrency that promises the latest and greatest "blockchain tech"? I thought you guys said Ethereum was gonna be the next big thing
I'm so not part of 'you guys', btw d:)
Would be happy to share a dev key to our viz API: leo@gr...stry.com . Some examples of what's possible: https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry . Gets fun when you combine it with a Spark cluster and the full blockchain :)
"Encryption"
"Door Lock"
"Camera-Free Bedroom"
Perhaps you feel the case should be otherwise. That's reasonable. But it is also a wildly heterodox view not generally sympathetic to those who are not already privacy absolutists or likely to become so, and you may find it worth your while to consider whether this particular hill is the one you want to die on.
This is an argument against web proxies, VPNs, all encryption, safes, door locks, window blinds, tamper evident tape, and just about every other privacy/security technology ever invented.
Why is economic value transfer so special a use case that we must hamstring it in the name of crime prevention?
Further, that which facilitates the contravention of a nation's laws, in a way which renders detection and prosecution of the crime effectively impossible, is of its nature a direct attack on that nation's sovereignty. No government which wishes to maintain its power intact can long suffer such an infraction. I suspect that's why the toplevel commenter who started this thread spoke in such fashion. Bitcoin dodged one bullet already in the fallout from the Silk Road debacle. This looks like it might be another.
Paying criminals was possible before cash was invented, and it will continue to be possible into the future. We even have movies that have hitmen being paid in gold, diamonds, favors, and other exchangeable assets as major plot devices.
> difficult to achieve
Our ancestors successfully exchanged goods and debt thousands of years ago. I doubt modern humans will have any difficulty inventing new non-cash methods of paying for services.
This isn't theoretical, because we already see soap and other easy to fence goods used as exchangeable assets.
https://priceonomics.com/why-thieves-steal-soap/
Products like cigarettes and soap are appealing because they can
perform some of the major functions of money. Since there is a
consistent demand and market for them [...] they retain their value.
[...] Since they have standard sizes, they can also be used as a
unit of account. [...]
In areas where fences or other buyers are always willing to purchase
stolen products, soap is just as good as money.
How about scaling it? Do you wanna carry a lorryful of soap/cigarettes to buy an iPhone or how? One odd person may still choose to do so and one odd seller may accept such a payment. But it is sufficient just to imagine millions of people doing it tens/hundreds of times a day/week to understand how it becomes not only weird but also almost foolish.
e.g. going to on a picnic, carry a truckload of soap/cigarette packs to pay at airport, hotels, restos and so on and hope that there are enough people out there to accept payment using such goods.
Anonymity or not, the other important properties of cash are flexibility, versatility, convenience and unparalleled liquidity. Economics 101.
That's because something like this makes it super easy for any government that wants to to say something like "Look. We've already seen that Bitcoin is heavily used in criminal activity, everything from drug deals to contract murder to traffic in child pornography. Now we have people building technology around Bitcoin to make it impossible for law enforcement to tell when it's used in those crimes and others, and also impossible to use Bitcoin transfer records as evidence in prosecuting the people who commit them. It's time to acknowledge the truth about Bitcoin. It's not a currency. It's not a new form of money. It has no legitimate purpose. It's just a tool for criminals to get away with their crimes."
Please don't waste your time and mine by arguing with me that this is deeply tendentious, inaccurate, unfair, unjust, against privacy, immoral, and fattening. For the sake of us all getting on with our lives, I freely concede that it is all those things. Does it matter? As I've already pointed out, what we're talking about here is something that will get right up the nose of pretty much any government in the world. Few governments are notably sympathetic to the rhetoric of privacy absolutism. I think it would behoove those with an interest in Bitcoin to consider how they might respond, more persuasively and usefully than such rhetoric can manage, in the event the US government (for example) proves not yet too spavined to muster some backbone in reacting to the idea of untraceable Bitcoin transfers.
(As an aside, it's things like this that are a big part of why I keep my money safely away from Bitcoin. It's technologically impressive, to be sure, and someone is going to do something amazing with a blockchain someday. But Bitcoin also shows a very strong tendency to attract people who are comfortable addressing a wide range of subjects, from the way governments work to the way money works to the way information security works, purely on the basis of wishful thinking. This makes things exciting! SpaceX's static test yesterday got exciting, too. Such events often strongly reward observation - ideally from a long way upwind.)
There's overwhelming evidence at this point that deterrents have little-to-no effect in crime prevention, so this argument falls flat before it can begin.
> Further, that which facilitates the contravention of a nation's laws, in a way which renders detection and prosecution of the crime effectively impossible, is of its nature a direct attack on that nation's sovereignty. No government which wishes to maintain its power intact can long suffer such an infraction.
This is a ridiculous assertion. Anonymous money doesn't defeat armies, or redraw borders, or overturn laws. Cash has existed for literally thousands of years and many sovereign nations have risen and fallen during those times.
This is true, but "this is how we've always done it" is a very poor reason to do something.
The problem with this is that those in power determine what is considered criminal, which is only vaguely correlated with what is unethical enough to be worth criminalizing.
> But it is also a wildly heterodox view not generally sympathetic to those who are not already privacy absolutists or likely to become so, and you may find it worth your while to consider whether this particular hill is the one you want to die on.
If you were actually offering me advice for my own good, I'd take it for what it is. But you aren't. This is just a way of making it sound like privacy is not worth talking about. If you want to make an actual point against privacy I'd be happy to respond to it.
I don't appreciate your advice as advice, because it's clearly ignorant of my actual goals. The thing about mathematically-enforced privacy is that it doesn't have to become the orthodoxy to become effective.
Currently, if you receive money it is possible to trace it back to some event, be it a theft, or funds used in some legal or moral grey area.
While these tools will make it easier to launder money, they will remove this "taint".
It is possible and likely that governments will attempt to censor transactions using these "tainted" funds, seriously damaging fungibility.
Many believe that for digital currency to succeed, it must be fungible - the title of the Bitcoin whitepaper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
Untraceable remote money transfers to anonymous parties are the scammer's dream. This makes Bitcoin a scam magnet.
With a centralized currency, the central repositories of currency have ultimate control over the currency: if a mistake or fraudulent transfer occurs, they revert it.
With a decentralized currency, the central repositories of currency have no real control over the currency if they lose control of the keys.
The solution, of course, is don't centralize. At a low level of course, theft can still occur, but notably, if a bank decides to steal from you by i.e. introducing fees or whatever, you they can do that and you can't really do anything about it.
Another would be to only store the centralized currency, and only facilitate transactions. So the person with USD deposits USD into the facilitator's account and provides a Bitcoin address to the facilitator. When the person with Bitcoin decides to make the trade, they make a Bitcoin deposit to the facilitator's account. The Bitcoin deposit automatically gets forwarded to the person who deposited the USD, and the USD gets forwarded to the person who had Bitcoin.
At no point in this transaction does the facilitator store Bitcoin.
The definition of "money laundering" is transforming "dirty money" into "clean money", and "dirty money" is by definition wrong, or at least illegal.
Anonymizing money for non-dirty purposes is something else. The mechanics might be identical to money laundering mechanics, but we shouldn't call it laundering.