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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Have there been any attempts to deal with this kind of thing within Bitcoin? Like, could everyone agree to blacklist specific coins that were known to have been paid as random? Would it be plausible for a large government to introduce regulation to demand any proper exchange to refuse coins originating from a ransom? Or is that just impossible?

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This is probably easier than "normal" money laundering due to the traceability of BTC. But it flounders on the usual problems of money laundering (for example the biggest money laundering locations globally are London and NYC.)

We can solve money laundering but it needs political will - write your congressman!

> We can solve money laundering but it needs political will - write your congressman!

Is this one of those things that's completely trivial as long as you're willing to completely throw privacy out the window and make life more difficult for completely legitimate transactions, or is it really "just" political will?

Political will is a big part of it. No one wants to say it, but money laundering is very profitable for all parties involved. Additionally a big chunk of that money will be bribed to and from very powerful people, who don’t want to see that flow reduced.

There’s been plenty of examples of politicians deliberately hampering corruption and fraud investigations because they might embarrass the current government. Semi-recent good example is Theresa May hampering the serious fraud office in the U.K. [1].

Lots of this work can be don’t in a privacy sensitive manner, and without impacting legitimate transactions, but that would require the political will to do more than just pay lip service to the problem.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/serious-fraud-office-na...

Isn’t avoiding regulations one of the main points of Bitcoin?

Maybe, but that doesn't make the question invalid. If a majority decides a subset of coins is invalid or should not be used, wouldn't that work?

It doesn't stop a government trying. If an exchange is in their jurisdiction then what choice do they have? It would depend how many governments would enforce it - so probably goes back to the political will question in some comments above.

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