Meanwhile back in the real world....a lot of the time money involved in bank robberies has usually been tainted by the dye pack exploding. Try spending some of that tainted money. It is a great deterrent that banks use to try and keep down robberies, not that it always works, b/c there will always be people stupid enough to try and rob them.
You seem to believe there are no successful bank robberies anymore? prolly nothing that's given publicity, and reasonably so, but there are actually many successful bank robberies nowadays.
Then there are counterfeit bills, which are also a form of stolen money. When a person tries to use a counterfeit bill and it is detected, they lose the bill(s). And they have some 'splainin' to do. Businesses that have not done due dilligence on the money they are given and try to deposit a counterfeit bill at the bank lose that money. Nobody reimburses them, it is a loss. It encourages the business to check the bills more thoroughly the next time.
So you're putting note checking and blockchain scrutinizing at the same level? do you honestly believe the common folk can be reasonably expected to have knowledge of the working in the blockchain?
I don't see what the issue is in doing due diligence and seeing where the coins being paid to you are coming from via the blockexplorer. There are very very few bitcoin businesses that require instantaneous action upon receiving bitcoins. Most can wait at least an hour or so before taking action. More than enough time for the receiver to check out the incoming transaction. Plenty of time while waiting on the standard 6 confirmations, actually. And still far less hassle than paypal.
Trading BTC isn't just for nerdy businesses... in theory it's for everybody.
You want people to trust Bitcoin, you want them to use it as a store of value, a currency. And you want to have absolutely zero consequences when a thief steals it, or rips people off. It is kinda like asking people to bank in Somalia. This is one of the many reasons why widespread adoption of Bitcoin will not happen.
No. But the reality is that you can do very little to find out who stole the money, and what's happening now is that the burden of proof is being switched over, ending with presumption of innocence.
Let's say someone sells a product or service in the Silk Road and then simply doesn't want to tell MtGox (many things that are legal in some places are serious crimes in Japan). Coins lost? this concept of taint is not even explicitly defined anywhere in the community. How much taint is enough taint to warrant getting your coins confiscated in an exchange unless you disclose the origin of your transactions fully? this opens the door to things like regional boundaries for money and government taxation. My stance about this is total opposition.
This whole concept introduces a big degree of uncertainty about fungibility. It undermines bitcoin massively. I'm really not ready to accept any coins right now with all this mess going on, I will just mine for the time being. Considering alternative cryptocurrencies at this point but most if not all of them are prone to the same problems. Might start coding my own but I have too much in my plate already.
In other words: don't get your coins stolen. Problem solved. The way the protocol works right now, having private keys in a shared medium is RECKLESS and is akin to leaving your wallet with your credit cards and their pins written onto them in a bar.
TLDR: criminal individuals are a problem but criminal government and institutions are a bigger problem. The whole point of bitcoin is not to let them take control of what you do with your money. "Money does not commit crimes. People commit crimes."
TLDR2: anonymity can be opt-out, as in you proving beyond protocol means that you did some transaction. What it cannot be is opt-in (you have to give proof of origin for your transactions beyond protocol means, on demand). In this case there is barely any anonymity at all. Even having it opt-out requires some infrastructure to guarantee it holds, like exchanges who give clear conditions on the BTC they accept and such.
