The Bitcoin community actually went along with each of Karpeles excuses
I haven't been following the bitcoin community reaction, but from what I remember reading here, most people seemed VERY critical of his explanations of what happened.
The truth is, Bitcoins aren't traceable if you know what you're doing over Tor
Do you mind explaining this a bit? My understanding is that there's a trail of all transactions (transfers, I guess) of a bitcoin, so there's some tracking of the history of the funds. If it's a matter of mixing small amounts into larger shared wallets, it seems like what's needed (if it doesn't already exist) is a curated list of known bad bitcoins. If there was a public service to check whether the source bitcoin is blacklisted (or what percentage it's blacklisted, if mixed into a larger wallet), then sites accepting bitcoin trasnfers could make decisions on whether to accept it or not. This obviously would only work if a) people were willing to accept this list as bad, b) doing the legwork of tracking the history of a coin back isn't too computationally expensive, c) it was adopted soon, before the coins got too mixed in and how "bad" they are is diluted. It's then in your best interest to reject bad coins because it taints your wallet.
But maybe I've got a few assumptions in there that are completely bunk. I'm mostly an outsider to this.
In any case, the fact that bitcoin has a trail built in seems like it offers numerous ways to reduce the attractiveness of stealing them by making them harder to convert into goods and currency.
I haven't been following the bitcoin community reaction, but from what I remember reading here, most people seemed VERY critical of his explanations of what happened.
The truth is, Bitcoins aren't traceable if you know what you're doing over Tor
Do you mind explaining this a bit? My understanding is that there's a trail of all transactions (transfers, I guess) of a bitcoin, so there's some tracking of the history of the funds. If it's a matter of mixing small amounts into larger shared wallets, it seems like what's needed (if it doesn't already exist) is a curated list of known bad bitcoins. If there was a public service to check whether the source bitcoin is blacklisted (or what percentage it's blacklisted, if mixed into a larger wallet), then sites accepting bitcoin trasnfers could make decisions on whether to accept it or not. This obviously would only work if a) people were willing to accept this list as bad, b) doing the legwork of tracking the history of a coin back isn't too computationally expensive, c) it was adopted soon, before the coins got too mixed in and how "bad" they are is diluted. It's then in your best interest to reject bad coins because it taints your wallet.
But maybe I've got a few assumptions in there that are completely bunk. I'm mostly an outsider to this.
In any case, the fact that bitcoin has a trail built in seems like it offers numerous ways to reduce the attractiveness of stealing them by making them harder to convert into goods and currency.