Author: Police Terror 2016-06-23 21:31:29
Published on: 2016-06-23T21:31:29+00:00
In England, if authorities compel you to hand over data and it is within your means to obtain it, you are obliged to do so under threat of criminal offense. This means that any mechanism whereby data could be collected from Bitcoin users, whether it's stored ephemerally or not, can be compelled by the police if they have reasonable suspicion to think it exists. Deniability is not a defense when served with a police notice for disclosing data, and companies need to be aware of how these mechanisms can be used for intimidating users or leveraging technologies.The bitcoin-dev community agrees that built-in AML/KYC tools in Bitcoin is bad as it might draw expectations from all users from authorities. Companies or individuals who want and/or need AML/KYC can find ways and do it at their side isolated from the entire network, and the solutions shouldn't come from upstream. BIP 75 was designed to allow voluntary identity exchange at the application level, on an encrypted https (or other) connection between the sender and receiver. Identity data is not passed through or stored on the blockchain, and there is no mark left on the blockchain that identity was even exchanged on that transaction. The only people who know identity info was exchanged are the counterparties in the transaction and depending on the implementation, their service provider. The bitcoin-dev community did this to protect user privacy as well as fungibility and to allow the people who want or need to exchange identity info the option to exchange it, in a standards-based way, directly between peers, without touching the blockchain or network itself.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T18:48:38.586268+00:00