Ethereum is very different in this regard than Bitcoin.<p>Ethereum has accounts. So when Ana sends coins to Berta, Berta has no way to leave those coins untouched. As they just raise the amount of coins she owns. So next time Berta sends coins to Charles, it is unclear <i>which</i> coins she sent and if those include Ana's coins.<p>Bitcoin on the other hand has no accounts. When Ana sends coins to Berta, she just marks those coins as "Can be spent by Berta in the future". Berta can decide to never touch them. When Berta sends coins to Charles, she decides <i>which</i> of her coins she sends.<p>It is even more complex, as the conditions how the Bitcoins can be spent are defined by little scripts. Even though those scripts are (for now) more restricted than on Ethereum.<p>So it is not really true that Bitcoins are "on address 17f8..". In reality that means the Bitcoins are locked by a script that demands any transactions must be signed by the secret key that matches public key 17f8...<p>So in a sense, Bitcoin does not have addresses. It has scripts.<p>I wonder how Blockchain explorers deal with more complex scripts. For example on blockchain.com one can look up coins by putting an "address" into the search bar. But how would one look up coins that are not locked by a script that puts the coins under control of a certain key? Or a script that puts them under control of multiple keys?
Judges don't run code, so a dusting attack isn't going to magically obfuscate anything. The blockchain record is public and it's clear "to a reasonable person" that this is just a smokescreen.<p>That's really what's missing from web3: the concept of what a reasonable person [1] would believe - not a code-based contract.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.courthouselibrary.ca/how-we-can-help/our-legal-knowledge-base/reasonable-person-reasonable-man" rel="nofollow">https://www.courthouselibrary.ca/how-we-can-help/our-legal-k...</a>
One of the most interesting implications of this is that it is a slight vindication of the bitcoin maximalist "bitcoin fixes this" mantra. If a government can't exercise control over your unit of account, it doesn't matter what they sanction.<p>Of course the "bitcoin" that "fixes this" isn't the one we have in reality -- you can't use it widely and cheaply to transact and it's so volatile as to be useless as the unit of account for anyone with more than a few thousand $ nw.
Anti money laundering laws are similar to attempts to ban encryption because "criminals might use it to plan crimes". Instead of focusing on catching criminals doing illegal things using time honored criminal investigation techniques, the government has chosen to curtail everyone's right to privacy and free speech.<p>An analogous situation would be if the US government published a list of IP addresses which were known to have sent encrypted traffic, and declared that anyone receiving packets from these addresses (regardless of whether they wanted to or not), might be prosecuted.
This has always been my idea for how I would try to extract a large amount of money if I ever managed to hack a big Defi protocol. Distract exchanges and regulators by splitting the stolen proceeds into tons of tiny amounts, send most of it to random famous accounts in small chunks, and have some of it go to my accounts which have been set up ahead of time to look like innocuous whales.
0.1 ETH per address? That's $168 at current prices. Someone is spending a lot of money to prove a point. Where do I sign up to get some of this "dust"?
Back in the merged mining days of bitcoin/namecoin, there was a lot of worthless namecoin around and you didn't exactly know what to do with it:<p>So I had the bright idea to go around collecting publicly listed namecoin addresses - bitcointalk signatures, github donation addresses, developers, you name it I think I gathered about 100 addresses<p>I wrote a bash script and put looped namedcoind to read my text file and send the minimum tx amount to a random address every second....<p>So that was running in a (detached) screen and I got busy and forgot about... for a few days...<p>Some folks didn't think that was very funny and called it an "attack"
Why this will cause chaos is that Chainalysis and similar tools for sanctions screening are all / nothing - if the rule was that "anyone who has touched Tornado assets should be banned", then sending small amounts to everyone means that the industry has to ban everyone.<p>The point is to show the difficulty of using such a blunt tool. By the letter of the law, everyone based in the US is a criminal if they receive Tornado funds, and legally must contact the OFAC office.
It looks like this only checks <i>one</i> of the blacklisted addresses. For the full set, see:<p><a href="https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20220808" rel="nofollow">https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...</a><p>Blacklists have been a topic in Bitcoin for ages. The problem with a blacklist is that in principle, identity creation is easy. Tornado team gets just one new address, and it's whack-a-mole time for Treasury.<p>I doubt this will work out the way Treasury thinks it will.
Can somebody more knowledgeable confirm if all your coins will become forever tainted if you are "dusted" like this? As there is no way how to break ever break the paper trail using just bitcoin is only way how to make your coins clean going to monero and back again or something like that?
Are techniques determining if your coins are tainted or not on exchanges where they could be refused or confiscated sophisticated enough to not flag you in cases like these? Even if its possible I imagine its computationally expensive.
A bit of context: <a href="https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=tornado-cash-added-to-us-sanctions-list" rel="nofollow">https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=tornado-cash-added-to-us-sa...</a>
So what? If North Koreans stand outside of the mall and make it rain dolla bills and you pick one up doesn’t mean you are now a criminal. This is dumb as hell
This outcome was as obvious as it was inevitable.<p>There is no mechanism in crypto to reject incoming funds, and all the top addresses are public.<p>Anyone could easily send the top 100,000 wallets “tainted” crypto.
It's easy to handle dust transactions. There are many ways of going about it, such as disregarding transactions that have certain parameters. Binance's wallets are not threatened by this.
I believe this hyperlink might have a sanctioned address in it, and therefore puts HN and readers at risk of violating US sanctions, or creating reporting requirements, if distributed...<p>Sanctions list excerpt: <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20220808" rel="nofollow">https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...</a>