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It is simpler than that. You can exchange equally valued wallets with someone from another jurisdiction and then just say truthfully that it wasn't you. A good

It is simpler than that. You can exchange equally valued wallets with someone from another jurisdiction and then just say truthfully that it wasn't you. A good program will make a couple of thousand small feeless transactions that miners may possibly include over many many blocks and poof. Money becomes too spread out to trace effectively.

jacques_chester 7y ago
The schemes that a smart person can come up with, given a few days, are numerous. The schemes that the many smart people in the legal profession have seen through, collectively hundreds of thousands of times over centuries, are several orders of magnitudes more numerous. A good lawyer would be doing everything short of bodily tackling you before you compounded your problems by adding subversive accounting to perjury to criminal profits. The law is like the Simpsons. It goes on for so long that nothing is left unexamined. The odds that you will think of something that they haven't are slim.
- hnews_account_1 7y ago
  While I have the utmost respect for the profession of law (except for the fact that it produces politicians whom I abhor), I don't think they've had quite enough time to think through every eventuality in tech yet. I'm not even sure if crypto currency ownership through key control is encoded in modern laws (as it should be for all digital assets). If you have interesting precedents though, please enlighten me. Accounting forensics are always interesting for finance people like me, and the blockchain ledger just makes it easier and yet more complicated.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    The law is always catching up, but folks regularly overestimate the scope of what it has already seen. It's an engine for conducting analogous reasoning, and while technology is ever changing, people are fairly limited in scope. Take the key control problem. The separation of ownership and control crops up in a number of places: corporations, trusts, real property, intellectual property, probably a bunch of other places I have no idea about. It's likely that one or more of these would map sufficiently cleanly that a judge would make a binding order. I don't have access to law reports to do a quick look for relevant cases. If you thought STEM paywalls were bad ...
    - hnews_account_1 7y ago
      Hmm. I don't agree with you on the fact that almost everything will have some easy to map analogous precedent / law clause. But I do appreciate the fact that I know literally nothing about law and that any fantastical suggestions I make would be ignorant at best, like you point out.
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
        The flip argument is that new cases arise constantly and that the law is always encountering totally novel circumstances. But by and large, most things have been done, or some echo has been. It's just that the novel stuff gets more press.
ur-whale 7y ago
That's a very dangerous thing to do (as soon as the deal is one, one party can easily move the content of both wallets to a key only they control).
- hnews_account_1 7y ago
  Well the fugitive who receives the coins can immediately move it to somewhere in their control. And the non fugitive knows that the fugitive won't touch the coins because he can be outed by the non fugitive. I dunno. It's hare brained since I haven't thought through it, but a good setup can be made if physical meeting was a possibility. About the only way to anonymously exchange coins.

jacques_chester 7y ago

The schemes that a smart person can come up with, given a few days, are numerous. The schemes that the many smart people in the legal profession have seen through, collectively hundreds of thousands of times over centuries, are several orders of magnitudes more numerous. A good lawyer would be doing everything short of bodily tackling you before you compounded your problems by adding subversive accounting to perjury to criminal profits. The law is like the Simpsons. It goes on for so long that nothing is left unexamined. The odds that you will think of something that they haven't are slim.

hnews_account_1 7y ago
While I have the utmost respect for the profession of law (except for the fact that it produces politicians whom I abhor), I don't think they've had quite enough time to think through every eventuality in tech yet. I'm not even sure if crypto currency ownership through key control is encoded in modern laws (as it should be for all digital assets). If you have interesting precedents though, please enlighten me. Accounting forensics are always interesting for finance people like me, and the blockchain ledger just makes it easier and yet more complicated.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  The law is always catching up, but folks regularly overestimate the scope of what it has already seen. It's an engine for conducting analogous reasoning, and while technology is ever changing, people are fairly limited in scope. Take the key control problem. The separation of ownership and control crops up in a number of places: corporations, trusts, real property, intellectual property, probably a bunch of other places I have no idea about. It's likely that one or more of these would map sufficiently cleanly that a judge would make a binding order. I don't have access to law reports to do a quick look for relevant cases. If you thought STEM paywalls were bad ...
  - hnews_account_1 7y ago
    Hmm. I don't agree with you on the fact that almost everything will have some easy to map analogous precedent / law clause. But I do appreciate the fact that I know literally nothing about law and that any fantastical suggestions I make would be ignorant at best, like you point out.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      The flip argument is that new cases arise constantly and that the law is always encountering totally novel circumstances. But by and large, most things have been done, or some echo has been. It's just that the novel stuff gets more press.

ur-whale 7y ago

That's a very dangerous thing to do (as soon as the deal is one, one party can easily move the content of both wallets to a key only they control).

hnews_account_1 7y ago
Well the fugitive who receives the coins can immediately move it to somewhere in their control. And the non fugitive knows that the fugitive won't touch the coins because he can be outed by the non fugitive. I dunno. It's hare brained since I haven't thought through it, but a good setup can be made if physical meeting was a possibility. About the only way to anonymously exchange coins.