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Yes, and all the coffee shop knows is that you paid them money from an account that has a couple hundred dollars in it. You have your cold storage where most o

by stale2002 9y ago

Yes, and all the coffee shop knows is that you paid them money from an account that has a couple hundred dollars in it. You have your cold storage where most of your money is, and you have new wallets for the purpose of hold your X thousand dollars of general spending money. In the same way that a coffee shop can notice that you have physical dollars bills in your wallet that you just pulled out to pay from. If your coins were mixed (or transferred through monero and back again, or whatever), it can't be tracked where the money came from. And this isn't even getting into the really interesting stuff that is coming down the pipeline, such at decentralized exchanges.

EGreg 9y ago
So now you are on the hook for using coins that have gone through a mixer. The governments have the most leverage over exchanges and whoever "cashes out" Starbucks. If they tell them to stop taking coins that have been through a mixer then what are you going to do? China for example recently banned all exchanges period. We need the majority coins to go through mixers same we need more people to use TLS / Tor / whatever for there to be any strength in numbers. And even then, Russia and China can do practically whatever the government wants: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/vladimir-putin-russia-smoking-ban-plan-born-after-2015-cigarettes/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/v...
- stale2002 9y ago
  I mean, at that point you may as well say "what if the government just decides to ban bitcoin". But they aren't doing THAT. Blacklisting certain addresses is arguably 'harder' for the government to do than a simple straight up ban. Blacklisting address is difficult, as the coins can quickly and easily be transferred to an unexpecting, innocent party. And now all of a sudden ALL coins are tainted. What, is the average person going to track which coins are on the secret government blacklist and which aren't? If they don't do that then their coins are at risk of being tainted, and now THEY are on the ever expanding blacklist as well. The government has only 1 option, a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies. Anything else is just this impossible game of wakamole that will hurt innocents way more than the bad guys. If they don't do the blanket ban, then the cat is out of the bag.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    I think the proper way to blacklist is by posting an advisory on some list. And then all payment processors / miners / etc. in a jurisdiction must respect that list. And everyone else would do well to check the lists because their payment might become not accepted down the line.
    - spdionis 9y ago
      You would have to modify bitcoin itself, probably through a hard fork, to implement such a blacklist. You don't need payment processors to transfer bitcoin, that's actually the point of it!

EGreg 9y ago

So now you are on the hook for using coins that have gone through a mixer. The governments have the most leverage over exchanges and whoever "cashes out" Starbucks. If they tell them to stop taking coins that have been through a mixer then what are you going to do? China for example recently banned all exchanges period. We need the majority coins to go through mixers same we need more people to use TLS / Tor / whatever for there to be any strength in numbers. And even then, Russia and China can do practically whatever the government wants: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/vladimir-putin-russia-smoking-ban-plan-born-after-2015-cigarettes/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thesun.co.uk/news/2578222/v...

stale2002 9y ago
I mean, at that point you may as well say "what if the government just decides to ban bitcoin". But they aren't doing THAT. Blacklisting certain addresses is arguably 'harder' for the government to do than a simple straight up ban. Blacklisting address is difficult, as the coins can quickly and easily be transferred to an unexpecting, innocent party. And now all of a sudden ALL coins are tainted. What, is the average person going to track which coins are on the secret government blacklist and which aren't? If they don't do that then their coins are at risk of being tainted, and now THEY are on the ever expanding blacklist as well. The government has only 1 option, a blanket ban on all cryptocurrencies. Anything else is just this impossible game of wakamole that will hurt innocents way more than the bad guys. If they don't do the blanket ban, then the cat is out of the bag.
- EGreg 9y ago
  I think the proper way to blacklist is by posting an advisory on some list. And then all payment processors / miners / etc. in a jurisdiction must respect that list. And everyone else would do well to check the lists because their payment might become not accepted down the line.
  - spdionis 9y ago
    You would have to modify bitcoin itself, probably through a hard fork, to implement such a blacklist. You don't need payment processors to transfer bitcoin, that's actually the point of it!