• bitofhope@awful.systems
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    11 hours ago

    Bitcoins aren’t really discrete individual units like that. Imagine you send me 0.1 bitcoin and my mom sends me 0.1 bitcoin and I then send 0.1 bitcoin to Alice (ignore transaction fees and such). It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you, from my mom or some specific mixture of both. The blockchain just records increases and decreases of a wallet’s balance.

    • rook@awful.systems
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      30 minutes ago

      It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you

      Ish. If you received a million CSAM’n’heroin bucks, and you give 10 bucks to Alice, there’s a transaction history that now links Alice’s wallet to CSAM’n’heroin which can indeed be a problem for Alice, because cautious exchanges might now freeze her assets until she can offer some proof that she’s not doing anything bad.

      There’s a bitcoin wallet attack that uses this trick that was mentioned recently, maybe here, maybe on web3igjg. You can argue the bitcoins aren’t the same, but in practise no-one cares.


      eta: this is apparently called a “dust attack” and I first heard about it here: https://awful.systems/post/3463061

      Merely interacting with a sanctioned wallet is enough to get or treated with suspicion, let alone receiving funds. Pecunia certainly olets these days.