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You'd have to be a special kind of stupid to "un-wash" your own bitcoins this way.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Possibly. The only reason this would be stupid is because Bitcoin has rapidly been centralizing. I suspect many exchanges might start blacklisting any wallet that has any transactions from this wallet. On the other hand, they can’t really do that. At that point the attackers would be able to poison any wallet just by sending a small amount of BTC to it. Therefore it seems like the only penalty is that they’d have to re-wash their coins.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > the attackers would be able to poison any wallet just by sending a small amount of BTC to it I'd be surprised if there was any followup blocking on this wallet. It might just be set as super high-taint wallet.
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  Random, totally not thought all the way through, idea. Could a decentralized nullifier be put in the blockchain? Allow the consensus algorithm to "vote" for when an address should be marked as invalid and miners would reject transactions with it. It would work by someone submitting an "anti-coin" transaction and wagering their own coin. Miners would provide PoW to confirm the transaction but instead of the miners collecting a reward they pay a fraction of the initial wager. Once enough blocks with a confirmation of the anti-coin are mined to pay back the wager it's accepted as permanent. Now the only way to use that address would be to fork the blockchain. On the other hand, if the anti-coin is not accepted the submitter loses their wager, so it becomes expensive to attempt to destroy coins without cause. But I don't know nearly enough crypto to even guess at whether or not this is a really stupid idea. Don't torch me for being foolish.
  - Taek 6y ago
    You can do this on a technical level but on a practical one it creates pathways for abuse which defeat much of the purpose of using crypto in the first place. And attackers like the one in the twitter attack would just choose to use cryptocurrencies where this isn't possible.

Possibly. The only reason this would be stupid is because Bitcoin has rapidly been centralizing. I suspect many exchanges might start blacklisting any wallet that has any transactions from this wallet. On the other hand, they can’t really do that. At that point the attackers would be able to poison any wallet just by sending a small amount of BTC to it. Therefore it seems like the only penalty is that they’d have to re-wash their coins.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> the attackers would be able to poison any wallet just by sending a small amount of BTC to it I'd be surprised if there was any followup blocking on this wallet. It might just be set as super high-taint wallet.
whoopdedo 6y ago
Random, totally not thought all the way through, idea. Could a decentralized nullifier be put in the blockchain? Allow the consensus algorithm to "vote" for when an address should be marked as invalid and miners would reject transactions with it. It would work by someone submitting an "anti-coin" transaction and wagering their own coin. Miners would provide PoW to confirm the transaction but instead of the miners collecting a reward they pay a fraction of the initial wager. Once enough blocks with a confirmation of the anti-coin are mined to pay back the wager it's accepted as permanent. Now the only way to use that address would be to fork the blockchain. On the other hand, if the anti-coin is not accepted the submitter loses their wager, so it becomes expensive to attempt to destroy coins without cause. But I don't know nearly enough crypto to even guess at whether or not this is a really stupid idea. Don't torch me for being foolish.
- Taek 6y ago
  You can do this on a technical level but on a practical one it creates pathways for abuse which defeat much of the purpose of using crypto in the first place. And attackers like the one in the twitter attack would just choose to use cryptocurrencies where this isn't possible.