[Frogolocalypse]

I'm surprised that it is taking as long as it is taking for this to occur. It's also one of the reasons why it is going to be virtually impossible to stop.

Over the past year there has been a corporate hijack attempt of the bitcoin consensus rules. The thing that is painfully obvious is how totally disorganised and incompetent the attack was. Anyone who understands how the technology works has listened to armies of get-rich-quick junkies explaining how their new fandangled blockchainz are gonna takeova da cryptoz. In reality, bitcoin is now stronger than it was six months ago, as its nodes are even more decentralized, and it is apparent to anyone who cares to look, that the threat of a PoW change that started being bandied about in bitcoin, actually made the corporate types slam on the brakes before they got crushed.

But when state actors get involved, that is going to be an entirely different story. I expect that at some point over the next couple of years, governments (like the US) will black-list bitcoin addresses, which undermines the ability to shift funds. They'll go to coinbase, or every other exchange in western nations, and tell them which addresses they want payments halted in. Which is why technologies such as lightning have been developed, to further decentralize value transfers in the system. It will even allow for the routing of payments through a multiple of different blockchains if a route can't be found between participants.

When any state actor decides that they want to start utilizing this value transfer system for things like oil, it will be trivially easy to circumvent sanctions. The greater the value of the market capitalization, the easier it will be to do this. I make no comment on whether it is good or bad. In many diplomatic arguments, sanctions are indeed a perfectly reasonable and effective way of addressing issues. They worked perfectly well in Iraq until the US invaded them anyway. They worked extremely well in the former Yugoslavia, and have curbed many of the worst excesses of Iran. But that only works when you control the money supply. The US, unfortunately, has abused that privilege for completely unrelated reasons, and now there is a method of permanently removing that control. It is what it is.

The fireworks haven't even started in this space yet.

[tCfD]

So I guess the takeaway here is that the secret ingredients to bitcoin's success have been facilitation of crime and corruption by obfuscating the agency principal relationship, thus concentrating wealth in the hands of the corruptible, leading to facilitation of bigger and better crime and corruption.

Congratulations are in order for Bitcoin both reinforcing the most degenerate aspects of human nature more effectively than ever before and for its charter adopters and boosters getting rich off the spiraling chain of negative externalities as the cancer spreads?

[Frogolocalypse]

The secret to bitcoins success is that if you cry wolf enough times, and take away peoples freedom to such an extent that they are impoverished by the wealthy, they will find a way to exert their power. This is what happens when you lose the moral high-ground.

Freedom is hard. Actually requiring probable cause before being subjected to the justice system used to be a thing. Then the US government started stealing peoples money without ever even charging them with a crime. So now we have crypto. So the government can't do it anymore. "But but but what if they are committing a crime!" they say. Prove it i say. You know. Rule of law. That's what democracies are supposed to be about aren't they?

That attack on freedom now has crypto as a response. The thing that it is counter-intuitive about crypto, is that the solution to electronic anonymous and censorship resistant money, turned out being record everything forever. When someone can flick a switch and take everything from you, you don't have freedom. When you can access the ledger from anyone, prove that it it is valid, and be able to send your money to anyone, for whatever purpose, you do. This technology has been developed as a direct response to the insidious and anti-democratic implementation of AML/KYC laws on a global scale over the past 30 years. The extrapolation of these laws, given a long enough timeline, is slavery. Not figurative slavery, actual slavery.

Bitcoin is the technical response to that problem.

[acdha]

That’s a rather incongruous jumble of ideas and, as usual, Bitcoin doesn’t actually solve any of the mentioned problems. If you’re concerned about asset forfeiture laws, vote better to change them – your Bitcoin will be seized and liquidated like everything else, and if you think you can hide a wallet ask how that’ll work out better than burying money or storing it offshore.

[DennisP]

Yes, you can store wealth in place by burying money. What you can't always do so easily is move it. But you can transfer bitcoins anywhere in the world without anyone blocking the transfer, and you can carry them in your car in a hardware wallet without fear that a cop will confiscate them.

Countries like Russia are looking for a way to move beyond the world dollar standard because the U.S. is able to shut down international dollar transfers for particular countries and banks, and uses that capability somewhat liberally. The U.S. probably can't do that to cryptocurrency, so I'd say it does in fact solve a problem for Russia.

A lot of us vote to change things. I've also gone to protests, gotten involved in party politics, all that stuff. It's not that effective anymore. 80% of the country wants net neutrality and a couple million people took the trouble to file comments with FCC; it made no difference at all. At some point you have to stop begging and start inventing things. As Buckminster Fuller said, "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

[acdha]

> But you can transfer bitcoins anywhere in the world without anyone blocking the transfer, and you can carry them in your car in a hardware wallet without fear that a cop will confiscate them.

As soon as they’re converted to/from real money, they fall under the same restrictions as everything else, and most of the places you’d want want to live share restrictions on unregulated financial transactions. Similarly, while there’s egregious abuse of cash seizures it’s not like the cops haven’t heard of other stores of value. If they suspect you’re doing something serious, following the money in is what already leads to headlines about police selling large quantities of Bitcoin — and that hidden hardware wallet is going to be seen as proof that you’re hiding something.

That latter point is the key one: there are a lot of people in jail because they thought they could hide money. I would not bet on having the opsec necessary to remove money from your accounts without leaving a trace, and with Bitcoin any mistake means you’ve left an irrevocable evidence trail behind.

[DennisP]

I'm not talking about hiding money. Plenty of people have had large amounts of perfectly legal and reported cash confiscated from their vehicles. They're often able to get it back eventually but only by suing. With a hardware wallet the cop can take it, but it won't make any difference.

All of which is beside the point of the actual article, which is about Russia using crypto to get past sanctions.

[abecedarius]

> your Bitcoin will be seized and liquidated like everything else

I suspect there's a difference. Old-style, the Man says to the bank, "Hey, until further notice, acdha's money isn't theirs anymore." The bank says "Yes, sir." Then you try to contest this using a lawyer on contingency or something, I don't know.

New-style, they say to you, "Hand over your private keys, you don't own them anymore." You say, "I'm calling my lawyer." Maybe the process ends in the same place, maybe it doesn't, but if possession is really whatever percentage of the law, outcomes will change on the margin accordingly.

To the extent this helps the likes of Putin, it's bad. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act)

[acdha]

New style seems more like they hold your devices until someone can crack them and/or keep you in jail without access until you hand over the keys, which a judge agrees to because there’s no other way to freeze your accounts. Meanwhile, the prosecutor is going to use not following existing financial disclosure/access laws as proof that you must be doing something really bad – and since those assets are off limits, you’re relying on an overworked public defender.

[abecedarius]

I'm thinking this is mainly an issue for the kind of people who store offshore wealth already (like the Russians this topic started with). Apparently there are trillions of dollars kept that way. They're generally not the sort who get stuck with public defenders, and my point is that cryptocurrencies could make that wealth of the wealthy even harder to confiscate.

(Yes, I did use you in the example instead -- a distracting choice, sorry.)

[htormey]

Devils advocate: That assumes they know about all of your wallets? It would be relatively easy to hand over one but keep another they don't know about right?

[IIAOPSW]

You still don't get it.

To bust sanctions is to go against the Washington consensus. But why did bitcoin become popular with American's in the first place?

The answer is that the Washington consensus has evolved to be just as opposed to the interest of every day American's as it is to the interests of states like Russia and Iran. Civil liberties have been eroded in the name of terrorism and pedophiles for a long time now. No amount of voting seems to fix these problems.

The founding fathers put gun rights in the constitution under the belief that the final protection of personal freedoms is the ability to defend it for yourself. Cryptography is the guns of the 21st century.

If bitcoin is being used to bust sanctions, its a problem that could have been avoided if the plutocrats in Washington hadn't prosecuted the endless drug war, engaged in civil forfeiture, used taxes to pursue unpopular bailouts, and just generally gave people a reason to want to exit their financial system.

[acdha]

Again, my point isn’t that the state of executive powers is great but rather that magical thinking about technology won’t solve them.

Moving real money into Bitcoin will leave a paper trail, as does moving it out. If you don’t disclose that or surrender control when required by law, they’re not going to just give up — that’s more like jail time until you cooperate (money laundering is an obvious lever), and most other countries will go along with that. Similarly, companies which are trying to be legit aren’t going to touch tainted bitcoins since they don’t want to be pulled in as accomplices.

[IIAOPSW]

>If you don’t disclose that or surrender control when required by law, they’re not going to just give up.

But its trivial to manage several separate financial persona's (wallets) and generally amortize yourself against losing/revealing everything.

>and most other countries will go along with that.

Countries within the Western sphere of influence sure. Just look at how the US got that BTC-E Russian on holiday in Greece. But consider the fact that some countries have more to gain by destroying US financial hegemony than they stand to lose by their own citizens petty crime. Russia makes bitcoin completely unregulated. So you try to contain the problem by blocking Ruble/USD exchange. Then China follows Russia's lead. Now you contain the problem by blocking RMB/USD exchange? Pretty soon you've locked so much of the world out that really all you've done is lock yourself in.

In the near future there will be so many leaks that the US and the West in general doesn't have enough fingers to plug every hole.

>aren’t going to touch tainted bitcoins

Monero

[mycall]

> Moving real money into Bitcoin will leave a paper trail, as does moving it out.

That will change with the Lighting Network.

[Kadin]

> But why did bitcoin become popular with American's in the first place?

Because it looked like a get-rich-quick scheme, and Americans like those as much as anyone else. More, in some cases, because there is a lot of cultural baggage in the US around the idea of becoming not just comfortable, but fantastically, fuck-you wealthy, from nothing, by getting in on the ground floor of some expanding industry or company.

People went crazy for canal stocks in the 1790s, railroads in the 1840s, industrials and utilities in the 1920s, Nifty Fifty in the 70s... and more recently, of course, dot-com stocks and then real estate. Lot of people out there looking for the Next Big Thing.

Most people in the market don't give a shit about Bitcoin as anything other than a vehicle for speculation.

[loceng]

People could alternately rally around strong thought leaders and get them elected. The problem is most people vote based on knee-jerk reactions and there is too money easily in politics.

[IIAOPSW]

>I expect that at some point over the next couple of years, governments (like the US) will black-list bitcoin addresses

Monero

[Larrikin]

You keep hyping up this alt coin. How many do you own?

[IIAOPSW]

I mentioned it twice because it was relevant to the discussion. Vast majority of my posts have nothing to do with Monero.

I prefer not to disclose my personal finances. If you think I'm hyping alt coins on HN for personal gain well then I guess there's nothing I'm willing to do to disprove that hypothesis.

[alanfalcon]

How do you effectively blacklist an address when you can just generate a new one? Treat it like a one time pad; unless the government is sending out these black lists in real time (but even then...)

[quickthrower2]

You could blacklist the originated address and then algorithmically ban any addresses they have spent money to, recursively.

If your address is banned by being downstream, you have to do an in person ID check or whatever and explain where you got the coins from.

Edit:

I have always wondered about the fungability of bitcoin. The case above would mean you have some 'hot' bitcoins that are probably worth less than market value. Someone may buy them with freshly mined ones for an exchange rate < 1.

Another scenario is really old bitcoins from 2010. Would they be worth more to 'collectors' if you can get a nice lineage.

[tCfD]

Old transaction outputs will be worth more at very least because future forks will try to legitimize their distribution as being, at least, no worse than Bitcoin by cloning its blockchain. Though that tactic may have run its course by now, if you already hold old outputs you probably aren't inclined to move them anyway, especially if they have the potential to spawn new, disposable offspring.

[Frogolocalypse]

Bitcoin is just a chain of transactions. This address to this address to this address to this address, right back to the block it was created in. It is not terribly difficult to validate whether the payment you're currently looking at existed as bitcoin in that address at some point or another. Like I said though, even the ability of that is likely to be undermined over the next 3-4 years.

[Firebrand]

I thought Coinbase, and many other U.S. based exchanges, already blacklist addresses and ban accounts attempting to send money to them.

[tehlike]

This only applies if they are using bitcoin. Monero, for example, is impossible to trace (with current known technologies).

[Frogolocalypse]

I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think this will have been at the direction of the US government, and not in a coordinated way. I would expect they have identified funds that have come from known hacks, and blacklisted them. But as I said, it wouldn't surprise me that much. If it hasn't happened already, it's going to. Only a matter of time.

I think it's one of the reasons why they have been so against some of the other crypto technologies like segwit and lightning. It removes them from the possibility of having that oversight role. I'm not the conspiracy type really, but it wouldn't come as a surprise that they have already had these discussions with regulatory authorities. Common sense really. The only real question is whether they have been encouraged to support or undermine technologies based upon those hypothetical discussions. They are who they are, and they work in that regulatory environment. It's not to be negative about them. They have a hand dealt to them, they play it.

[perfmode]

If addresses become banned, can’t the owner tumble the contents?

[tehlike]

Yes they can, or they can use something like monero or zcash.

[throwaway43241]

Indeed ! On some deeply visceral level, I really want the underdogs to beat the US (yes, I know the rulers of said places are not exactly 'nice' folk.)

[AlexCoventry]

It's perfectly feasible to stop it: Acquire sufficient computational resources to rewrite the blockchain history, and use it to discredit the blockchain as a reliable medium of exchange by constructing double spends.