zlacker

There is no solution because you would end up punishing innocent people. E.g. if a thief buys a car with their proceeds then it's not fair to punish the car dealership by confiscating the originally-stolen coins. This was decided in Scotland in 1749, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfurd_v_The_Royal_Bank

>>runeks+(OP)
How exactly are you punishing innocent people? What's happening is you're rewarding thieves.

Your example doesn't fit what I am saying either. With a digital currency you can do a pre-sale trick, so you'll see the funds were stolen - and you then don't sell them the car in the first place.

We can't incentivize theft.

>>runeks+(OP)
That Scottish decision, while still the basis for bona fide acquisition of money in the UK and US, does not yet appear to apply for cryptocurrencies.

Your Wikipedia link cites a 2019 paper published in the Georgetown Technical Law Review whose analysis (https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/...) on page 415-6 says that 2016 US v 50.44 Bitcoins (https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-5044-bitcoins) determined "cryptocurrencies do not meet the UCC's definition of money" and thus bona fide acquisition is not sufficient to prevent the crypto from being legally seized from the possessor and returned to the original owner.

>>loceng+tz
> With a digital currency you can do a pre-sale trick, so you'll see the funds were stolen - and you then don't sell them the car in the first place.

It's a race against time. As soon as the coins are sent to a new address you can't know whether goods or services were exchanged in this process and you are thus punishing a well-intentioned seller as opposed to the thief.

>>swarsh+H21
To be clear, I'm arguing that the same reasoning behind the Scottish decision is why cryptocurrencies don't have a built-in features that prevent stolen cryptocurrency funds from being spent: because it would make the currency non-fungible.

>>runeks+9e2
Isn't there a log to immediately know what wallet coins just came to to the new address? E.g. you could check the history of the new address, to see where the coins came from, before approving the transaction by first verifying it didn't come from known stolen funds?

Isn't that the prime value of blockchain - the immutable chain/record of transactions?