I think that is tinfoil-hat talk. I believe most people want a free and fair system, and so bitcoin will stay free and fair.
Unfortunately I don't think so. Sadly most people today would rather have security than freedom. That sucks, but it's how it is.
a bit of taint was peeled off every fee-paying transaction included in the block. So each newly generated coin can be traced back to a lot of addresses
. It's not very useful to define taint in this way, so blockchain.info for instance does not include it. If you perform taint analysis on a newly generated coin, you'll find zero taint.
Probably because blockchain.info's taint analyzer has very different goals than governments and the legacy financial system do. Be assured that if a taint system is imposed, it will deal with transaction fees.
Bitstamp is already
demanding receipts for mining hardware. This can be done. Semiconductor fabrication is
already heavily licensed. I have to be pretty creative with the EAR paperwork when taping out to overseas foundries.
It's really a shame that the Zerocoin people are taking the attitude of "claim priority (first to publish), somebody else can do the heavy lifting of actually making it work". Satoshi did it right, he did both, and he changed the course of history. People like Satoshi are the ones who created the Internet, and I see fewer and fewer of them in academia with each passing year.
