Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rabbitonrails 2597 days ago
Blacklisting certain coins is a form of centralization.
2 comments

Who controlls the blacklist? A black list is essentially a tool to drain anyone's wallet
On the contrary, it will increase the value of your assets due to less coins in circulation.

Governments could easily mandate such blacklists to be used (in fact, assuming you are a US person, you are already barred from interacting with certain addresses, see the treasury link above), I think it's only a matter of time until this happens. And compared to the fiat currencies, such requirements are much easier to verify, at least in non-private digital currencies.

Why? Everyone can decide freely which coins to accept.

Regardless, by law, accepting these coins would already constitute possession of stolen goods, and would therefore be illegal. The "legal fungibility" is already zero.

> Everyone can decide freely which coins to accept.

If that were happening at any scale, the coins would be essentially worthless as a currency. They only make sense if there's some kind of agreement as to what is an acceptable/valid bitcoin. But then having a blacklist of "stolen coins" requires an authority that curates the list.

One disadvantage of the Bitcoin/Ethereum architectures is that one cannot give permission to receive a currency transaction first.

A common strategy of hackers seems to be to distribute stolen digital currencies among many addresses of non-participating actors, therefore losing money, but obscuring their own identity.

If a bank robber came to your door and offered you a share of money, you wouldn't take it either, especially if this transaction is public.

Even though several billion dollars of cryptocurrency (compare with hundreds of billions of dollars) have already been stolen, my guess is that taking these coins out of circulation wouldn't affect the system much.

If that doesn't happen, everyone participating in cryptocurrency might become more and more legally liable.

"What color are your bits?": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

"Treasury designates [...] digital currency addresses": https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm556

Bitcoins are not specific units. They are more like water, infinitely dividable.

If you stole a bucket of water and then pour it in to your swimming pool and then distribute the content of your swimming pool to 100 different people, who has the bucket of stolen water?.

Bitcoin also doesn't track the movement of specific coins because they don't exist. Its just a list of transactions. A wallet with $100 in it gets $5 in and then sends out $5. How do you decide if this was the $5 that went in? Is it first in first out?

> A wallet with $100 in it gets $5 in and then sends out $5. How do you decide if this was the $5 that went in? Is it first in first out?

Even assuming you mean "address" rather than "wallet", you can decide by looking at which UTXO was consumed. This is a drawback of Bitcoin.