Why are you afraid of it? Did you steal anyone's wallet?

I am a supporter of the Bitcoin Foundation, and I think taint is a horrible idea.  All proposals to implement it so far are ineffective and are more likely to hurt naive bitcoin newbies than the thieves themselves.  The people who are 'out of the know' concerning taint will accept them, giving thieves a good or service in exchange, and they'll be stuck holding the bag.

Keeping bitcoins fungible is important.

This thread isn't for debating the merits (or lack thereof) of taint. However, there are plenty of threads that cover why this a bad idea already:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/85433.0
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/67383.0

So... if the membership agrees with your "bugs" then they'll get fixed.  Like I said, the vision is it will be a member-driven organization. And like I said, I find it is much more effective to start with something imperfect and improve it over time rather than try to get everything exactly right and make everybody completely happy at the start.

My personal opinion on the "bugs":

Name:  I like the name.  It can be changed if the membership decides on something better.

Hosting company: could easily be changed; it likely will be. I highly doubt Cloudflare is a government honeypot for anything besides catching DDoS botnet operators.

Identities/voting: Please see "Sybil Attack" for why we're requiring names, mailing addresses and emails. If you've got a magical way of identifying anonymous people please send me the source code, I could use it for the Bitcoin Faucet.

Privacy policy: fair point, there should be a privacy policy on the website.

US based: if Patrick (Foundation's lawyer) was Finnish we would probably be Finnish-based. That's the whole "perfect is the enemy of the good" thing (and I really don't want to have a month-long discussion about which legal jurisdiction is the least likely to declare Bitcoin Foundation illegal, which would be best for getting donors tax deductions, and whatever other arguments we could have).


One of the things that I think will be fascinating to watch is how users and miners organize themselves (or not) to elect people to the Board. I'm not going to pretend that the current composition of the Board is perfect-- I have no idea if some arrangement would be better. But it seems to me before making a statement like "there should be more of X on the Board" we should either get some experience under our collective belts to see how things work OR find an example of a similar, successful organization that works.

Now we start to get into some interesting human-nature discussions. Ultimately, bitcoin either fails or becomes an underlying tool on top of which traditional power structures are created if the masses are truly incapable of doing *a little* research and making their own decisions. You have to have *some* level of optimistic belief in human-nature, in the ability of people to see and seek a better alternative, in order to believe that something like bitcoin will result in a monetary utopia of sorts.

As noted, organizations such as TBF operating on top of bitcoin are inevitable. I believe this one has good intentions, with people on board who largely share the decentralization ethos. But there will be other orgs down the road with perhaps not-so-good intentions. It will be up to the masses to create the demand for the best software and best ecosystem. If you do not believe the masses are at all capable of making distinctions, then game over for certain utopian visions of bitcoin. 



Indeed. Would love to find some time to study that debate.

The road to heaven is paved with patience and liberty.

I'm happy that I'd already made a post in the Alternative client section, because if I hadn't I would have to do it now.

What you're saying here is that if something needs fixing (be it in bitcoind, TBF's setup, or other), it will only happen if enough paying members want it. So if something needs fixing that might not be beneficial to enough paying members (even if it is vital to the majority of the userbase that is not a member), it won't get done.

We really need a full alternative, TBF independent, client. Asap.

bitcoind is the bitcoin protocol. You can't have two different protocols that would be compatible. One thing you're forgetting are the miners. If there were to be a drastic change in the protocol, at least 50% of the miners would have to agree to it, thus I don't see a problem with having one "official" client representing the protocol. For everything else (gui, taint analysis, etc), we already have several clients that follow the same protocol, and you are free to use any one of them.

hehe, the only caveat is that, to be a member, you already have to:

• Don't care about your privacy and anonymity that much, since you'll have to identify yourslf
• Don't care about supporting an organization whose name is a lie in itself and will likely mislead people - with the high probability of this being intentional.

So, basically, those who are concerned about such "bugs" will probably never become a member. All they can do is to lament that so many people don't give a damn about it, including people important to Bitcoin like you.
Finally, this other reply of mine also applies here: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/113400.msg1225189#msg1225189


Pardon my ignorance, but how can somebody "sybil attack" it? I don't get it. Are GLBSE assets vulnerable to "sybil attack" because people can be anonymous shareholders?

If your concern is "an evil person" buying up the majority of votes and deciding everything, then please keep in mind:

• Bitcoin mining itself faces the same "risk", with a much greater impact in case it happens.
• Influent people like you could always start a new organization if somebody you don't like grabs control of this one. People would likely follow you as they're doing right now.
• At the very extreme, the bylaws could state that anonymous members as a whole don't get to have more than 49% of the votes, for example. I find this unnecessary, but it might tranquilize "unsecured" people.

[/list]

Not only is Gavin unlikely to humor this, it's a very disingenuous comparison. Bitcoin is at risk of a single malicious party which must afford to scale their attack against everybody else in the network, at direct opposition to the market incentive to act as an honest party. Not only is there not a market incentive to act as an honest voter in the foundation, the entry rates (2.5btc) are static and do not change based on the demand of new participants.

You simply cannot have a "1 person 1 vote" system that allows anonymous donation. Since they actually want their foundation to have credibility, they've made the right decision.