Let the market decide?

If a firm believes every claim no matter how fraudulent, then there's not going to be much of a demand for their opinion on what a dirty coin is.

just a complete waste of time/resources. Better spent actually securing wallets, but hey some people don't want to take responsibility for that.

The system makes stolen coins less valuable and clean coins more valuable. The overall wealth of the network is increased by reducing theft.

If you're able to securely possess your coins without any third parties, you still gain without incurring additional costs.

No, it adds needless complexity. If I'm joe new merchant selling tshirts, now I need to check with a handful of services before accepting coins? If I don't, some coins will be deemed less valuable by the community? That's quite a burden.

Fungible. It's a key part of a currency. Imagine if every merchant in the US had to cross check a list of serial numbers on dollar bills to check the 'stolen list' ?

No, you are selling a product with flaws.

The biggest flaw of BTC is obviously not that most people dont understand it.

I really want to make a poker analogy, but I leave it to myself. But, I think TC was the one, already correctly informed me, that it doesnt matter if the masses understand the product.

The complexity reduces costs, it doesn't increase them.

What do you think would happen if tomorrow I traded a condo for 25,000 Bitcoins that anyone looking at the public bitcoin transaction log will think was recently stolen? Is that a cheap, frictionless exchange?

Decentralized market forces will create centralized hubs of security/credibility on the network. If someone desires security/credibility, then barter occurring closer to these hubs will be more profitable for them

once upon a time... bitcoins were fun.

Gehrig, I'm not against it in principle, but I would think that criminals will always have a few good places to get hapless folks to accept dirty coins and normal people will bear the cost and annoyance caused by the agencies.

Now an agency or alliance or something that can help victims find thieves would be useful, it makes me nervous for other reasons, but I would of course love to have one to hire if something happened to me.

Gehrig, if you didn't know, the rule now on the forum is 5 posts in the newbie section and 4 hours. Unless they changed it again.

Actually no one is selling a product.

And no that is not "obvious" its a matter of opinion and actually comes up more times than I see anyone bitching about security. The number one question when people first hear bitcoin, "how does it work?" "huh? what about hackers" "man that is confusing" ect.

Then a lot of people lose interest simply because they didn't fully understand bitcoin, or make articles that make fun of the currency because they had trouble understanding how it works.

You have your opinions, I have mine.

Most people don't understand our banking system, and that doesn't keep anyone from using it. It is only a flaw that more people might *not* use it if they did understand it.

People don't understand almost everything that they use on a daily basis. It might slow down adoption if it's so complicated *no one* can understand it, or see the benefits from it. But if there are true benefits, people will see those, and take advantage of it.

People were born into the banking system with society, along with many other things people don't understand.

Bitcoin is new to everyone in the world where even some very intelligent people have written articles about how they think Bitcoin is horrible, lots of youtube videos too.

The media was getting corrected left and right when they started fiddling around in the world of Bitcoin, which causes chain reactions of others to believe these misunderstandings. Even then if they look into it, they can still be baffled for sometime before they even understand how the system works.

Security is a later concern and again not a huge one. No matter the amount of security is put in place for online uses such as credit cards, payment processors, banking, ect. people still get there information stolen. This goes back to getting some education on Bitcoin and how it works, that can prevent a lot of this from happening in the first place.

There are tons of new technologies that people don't understand and aren't born into. They just need to understand how to use it and how their lives are made better by it.

When someone gets their credit card stolen, they are generally made whole again. No one is going to steal $500,000 from my bank account without me being compensated.

Yes.. this is what I've just said.. and been saying..

Bitcoins are like cash, if someone steals 500K from you, chances are your out of luck.

When 3rd parties like banks/payment processors comes in to offer services for Bitcoin, then the same thing will happen, someone steals 500K worth of Bitcoins from you, and you get your money back since your under the protection of this 3rd party paying fees, just like for your cash--cash isn't held by you, and Bitcoins won't be either.

All Bitcoin transactions are public

Let's say all my bitcoin wealth comes entirely from my employer, who can credibly claim to run an honest business.

Now a bank opens up that discriminates against all deposits that aren't credibly honest. Since the source of my Bitcoins is entirely transparent if I want them to be, the bank can discriminate very cheaply. The bank can allow me to limit my withdrawals to only addresses I trust. There's no cost in establishing trust in my address, my sister's or some small shop owner I'm friends with. Giant retailers can establish the Honest Retailers Alliance to vouch for their trust. Exchange between myself and these addresses is extremely cheap (we're just moving electricity around and there's minimal fraud risk) and thus profitable.

If I want to withdraw to an address I don't trust, I can minimize the cost of the lack of trust by adding transaction costs like:

- Needing extra verification, like extra secret passwords, or finger print scanning, or access to some digital key I keep on my smartphone
- Making the recipient agree to be liable if I can prove the transaction to be fraudulent
- Requiring some discount from the recipient

Or whatever I think minimizes the costs of my barter with an untrustworthy source.

If you make barter between trusted parties cheaper, you get a lot more trusted parties.

you guys are killing the f*** out of electrons in this thread.

If two parties trust each other and exchange, then why would a third party need to get 5% fraud protection fees?

They wouldn't use the 3rd party obviously, just like with cash.

I'm making widgets in Calfornia
You're buying widgets in Florida.

How much does it cost for us to establish trust and exchange today?

The cryptographic ownership history is stored in the blockchain and thus any coin can be "tracked".

For example, some coins from the 500k theft were sent to a donation adress from bitcoincharts.com.

I may have missed when this first came up and it would make more sense if it was legislated. Without legislation why would a business hire any of those firms? Most customers who haven't had coins stolen from them are just going to see it as a possible reason for the firm to take their money. How do you stop coin laundry services? Although to be honest it's likely that all coin going in and out of such a service would be "dirty".

There's a problem in that Bitcoin is easily mixable and therefore clean coins can get mixed with dirty. If you then mark the new output (containing clean and dirty) as dirty you could end up with all coins in the system being dirty. So, you CAN trace coins, but you can end up in situations where you have many outputs that are only x% dirty rather than 100% dirty.

However, I certainly think we'll see some of what you're referring to above. It's essentially a bank and payment network. So I can make a payment using my bank to anybody in the network and have similar protection to bank or credit card transactions today. The only thing to note is that, although these transactions may be denominated in Bitcoin, the internal system that the bank/network is using isn't the bitcoin system at all.



That link explains it pretty well. However, it also says that you're wrong. Difficulty does not drive price, price drives the difficulty.

wrt security and virus protection, you're right that anti-virus software can help end users remain secure. However, it isn't a cure-all. You'll note that most people have anti-virus software but also have all sorts of random crap they didn't mean to install running on their machine. These same people rarely end up having money stolen from their bank accounts, but if they used bitcoin in its current state then a high % of them would have their wallets stolen. The fact is that computers today, and MS OSs in particular, make it difficult for uneducated end users to remain secure while maintaining a productive computer. This is obviously a big problem if you have a system that gives these same computers unfettered and irreversible control over the users's finances.

Anti MS rhetoric?

Not at all. They're easier to use but that comes with a price. However, they're certainly less secure in their methodology than some other OSs, although they've caught up in somewhat in the past few years. The fact that they're usually packed with the security black-hole that is IE doesn't help them much.

Read again..

4M max users before serious inefficiency/delays is a really, really small number if I'm understanding it correctly. Are there any other links or does anyone know more about that, like solutions and limitations?